The death of ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong-Il at the age of 69 was announced by state media in North Korea this morning.
According to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the power mad dictator suffered a heart attack on his private train on Saturday due to physical and mental over work.
Kim Jong-Il will be succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-Un, who has been dubbed the “the great successor”, with KCNA encouraging the North Korean people to support and “faithfully revere” their new leader.
While Kim Jong-Il wasn’t the most popular man around the world due to some absolutely terrible human rights abuses, his death has provoked mass mourning in North Korea with people reportedly weeping openly on the streets of capital city Pyongyang after hearing the news.
His death will spark concerns about the stability of North Korea and what effect it has on their oft publicised nuclear weapons and missiles programme although US President Barack Obama has already spoken to South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to discuss the security of a country which has had something of a difficult history with its northern neighbour.
Jong-Il’s passing continues a remarkable trend in what has been a bad year for tyrannical dictators, with Osama Bin Laden and Colonel Gaddafi also meeting their demise.
North Korea is now set to enter a three-year morning period, as it did when Kim Jong-Il’s father, Kim Il-Sung, passed away in 1994. The funeral of Kim Jong-Il is set to take place later this month and if all of his supposed achievements are included in the eulogy, it will make for a long ceremony indeed.
In 1994, Kim Jong-Il was reported to have shot 11 holes in one in his only ever game of golf on North Korea’s only golf course before retiring from the sport for ever.
He supposedly learned to talk aged three weeks and walk five weeks later, was rumoured to have a mind-altering ability to change the weather, wrote 1,500 books and also wrote six-full length operas, all of which are better than any in the history of music.
At this hour, however, perhaps we should remember Kim Jong-Il doing what he liked to do best, looking at things.
