Kim Gi-nam

KIM GI-NAM (1926- ). Kim Gi-nam has been secretary of the Korean Workers' Party (KWP) Central Committee since July 2000. He is also vice-chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, in which capacity he has made a number of visits to the Republic of Korea (ROK). He was born in Wonsan and graduated from Kim Il Sung University. He also studied at Moscow University. In the late1950s, he taught at Kim Il Sung University. During the 1960s and 1970s, he worked as an editorial writer on the Korean Workers' Party (KWP) newspaper Rodong Sinmun, then as deputy chief editor and later chief editor on the KWP theoretical journal Kulluja. In April 1976, he became chief editor of Rodong Sinmun and also chair of the central committee of the Korean Journalists' Union. He was elected to the seventh Supreme People's Assembly (SPA) in November the following year and has been a delegate to the SPA ever since. He has also been a member of the SPA Presidium. In October 1985, he became director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the KWP Central Committee, a post he held until July 2000, when he became secretary of the KWP Central Committee. In 1982, he was made a member of the Order of Kim Il Sung, and he was a member of Kim Il Sung's funeral committee in 1994. During a visit to the ROK in August 2005 as leader of a delegation to a Unification Festival marking Liberation Day, Kim made an unannounced visit to the National Cemetery in Seoul, where the ROK dead from the Korean War are honored.

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