Word: ils
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ancient Soviet Koryo Airways Ilyushin, departing from Beijing, I was handed the English-language Pyongyang Times. That day's front page showed a photo of a smiling Kim Jong Il under the headline "DPRK Shines Under the Leadership of Brilliant Commander." The "glorious" and "superb" Dear Leader was mentioned in nearly every article inside, giving "on-the-spot guidance" to industrial workers, farms or his generals...
...rest of the flight was uneventful, and within two hours we touched down on a runway surrounded by guard posts and barbed wire. The tarmac was empty. From the roof of the terminal building, a huge portrait of Kim Il Sung smiled down. After passing the entrance formalities, we were loaded onto a bus with four state guides. The photographer in me was ecstatic at what I was seeing. The visual texture of North Korea is different from any country on earth. It is stark and bizarre to the point of being surreal. Pyongyang may have more monuments and wide...
...pictures of the rise of Kim Jong Il...
...year 2000, Kim made a historic mark diplomatically. He traveled to Pyongyang for a summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il - the first meeting between North and South Korean leaders since the end of the war. The meetings came as part of Kim's so-called Sunshine Policy, which sought economic and diplomatic engagement with Pyongyang. His hope was that a more dovish stance toward the North would convince Pyongyang to rid itself of its nuclear-weapons program. He explicitly stated that reunification of the Korean peninsula would come only after a long period of "peaceful coexistence" with...
...policy also clashed with that of then incoming U.S. President George W. Bush, who famously told a journalist that he "loathed" Kim Jong Il. A summit meeting between the two ostensible allies went poorly. At one point in a 2001 summit, Bush publicly called the South Korean head of state "this man," instead of President Kim. Kim's supporters in Seoul were furious. Both sides would later acknowledge that the two Presidents had very differing views on how to deal with Pyongyang. (Read about Kim Jong Il's secret family...