Reputation follows elusive Kim

SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea’s reported nuclear test is not the first time Kim Jong Il has provoked the world and dismayed even his closest allies.

Since inheriting power in 1994, Kim has solidified his reputation as an unpredictable leader whose intransigence has deepened North Korea’s isolation.

Abroad, many consider the pudgy, bouffant-haired Kim a ruthless dictator who seeks atomic weapons while starving his people. But at home, the state-run media hails the “Dear Leader” as a prodigious general, an ace film director and the “Lodestar of the 21st Century.”

Kim, 64, has taken North Korea on an increasingly confrontational path, withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and culminating in Monday’s claim of a nuclear weapons test.

The West’s demonic image of Kim, however, goes back years before he took power. It is based in part on suspicions that he masterminded a 1983 terrorist bombing in Myanmar that killed 17 South Korean officials and the 1987 bombing of a South Korean airliner that killed all 115 people aboard.

Kim has ruled his impoverished country with a “military first” policy since the 1994 death of his father and North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung. He controls the world’s fifth-largest military, the 1.1 million-strong People’s Army.

For Kim, going nuclear is seen as one way for him to solidify his authoritarian rule with the military, his strongest base of support.

From North Korea’s point of view, nuclear weapons give the country an unparalleled deterrent from attack, something Kim has increasingly feared after watching the United States easily invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein.

Biographical insight on Kim is sketchy. He rarely appears in public and his voice is seldom broadcast. But defectors from North Korea describe him as an eloquent and tireless orator, primarily to military units.

He is said to be a movie fan who owns about 20,000 foreign films. He reportedly has produced several films himself, mostly historical epics with an ideological tinge.

His image is familiar around the world: 5 feet 3 inches and 187 pounds, he wears platform shoes and a bouffant hairstyle to appear taller.

Khaki jumpsuits and sunglasses are his trademark attire.

According to North Korean biographies, Kim once said, “Where there is love, there is hate.” He churns out book-length communist theses at one sitting, telling “all the truths of the world.”

He was Kim Il Sung’s eldest son by his late first wife, Kim Jung Sook. North Korea says he was born Feb. 16, 1942, in a “secret camp” at Mount Paekdu on the North Korea-China border when his father was supposedly a guerrilla fighter against the Japanese. Western officials say he was born in the Soviet Union.