Kim Yong Ju, the youngest known brother of North Korea’s founder who was briefly seen as a successor to the leader has died at the age of 101.
Kim Yong Ju was born in 1920 near the North Korean Capital and moved to Southern Manchuria when he was three with his family according to South Korea’s Unification Minister.
He studied politics, economics, and law at Moscow University and returned to North Korea in 1953 where his brother already controlled the country.
According to the official Korean Central News Agency, current leader Kim Jong Un sent a funeral wreath and expressed deep condolences over his death.
Kim Yong Jun was reported dead on Wednesday by North Korea’s state media saying that he “devotedly struggled to implement the party’s lines and policies and made a contribution to accelerating socialist construction”.
Kim Yong Ju made a splash on the international scene in the early 1970s when he led the North Korea delegation in secret talks with SouthKorea that resulted in the July 4th North-South joint Communique in 1972- the first inter-Korea agreement since the division of the Korean Peninsula.
He was briefly seen as the most likely successor to his old brother Kim II Sung in the 1970s after becoming deputy prime minister in 1974. But his prominence was short-lived and faded away easily as NorhKorea founder Kim II Sung started grooming his son Kim Jung II to take over.
Kim Yong Ju was removed from his posts and sent into the political wilderness for nearly two decades until he was given a prominent position in the ruling worker’s party in the early 1990s, in what was seen as a move by Kim II Sung to bring aboard a possible replacement if his son was not up to the task of being the supreme leader.
When Kim II Sung died in 1994, Kim Yong Ju became a member of the funeral committee and in a sign of unity, he remained in the political fold when Kim Jong II took power, serving as an honorary vice president.
He held many ceremonial roles in the years that followed but was never considered a likely heir to the family dynasty of the state forged at the start of the cold war and survived the fall of the Soviet Union.
After the Korean war ended in 1953, Kim Yong Ju is thought to have been a key player in purging rivals to his brother who was solidifying his rule over the state.
He was also one of the country’s ideological godfathers, who proposed the original version of North Korea’s guiding “Ten Principles for the establishment of a Monolithic Ideological System” which strengthened Kim II Sung’s legitimacy.
