— April 15, 1912: North Korean founder Kim Il Sung is born in Pyongyang.
— Feb. 16, 1942: Kim Jong Il is born in a guerrilla fighters' camp on Mount Paektu, the highest peak on the Korean peninsula, according to official North Korean history. Some sources say he was born in a Siberian village, and that the year of his birth was 1941.
— Sept. 9, 1948: Kim Il Sung establishes the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the northern half of the Korean peninsula.
— June 25, 1950: North Korea invades South Korea.
— July 27, 1953: The Korean War ends in a truce, not a peace treaty.
— September 1973: Kim Jong Il assumes the Workers Party's No. 2 post—the secretary for the party's organization, guidance and propaganda affairs.
— February 1974: Kim Jong Il is elected to the Political Bureau of the Workers Party's Central Committee and formally becomes North Korea's future leader.
— Oct. 10, 1980: Kim Jong Il's status as the country's future leader is made public at the Workers' Party congress, where he takes up other top positions.
— Jan. 8, 1983: Kim Jong Il's third and youngest son Jong Un is believed to have been born.
— Dec. 24, 1991: Kim Jong Il is named Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army.
— April 1993: Kim Jong Il is named Chairman of the National Defense Commission.
— July 8, 1994: Kim Il Sung dies of a heart attack and Kim Jong Il inherits power.
— Oct. 8, 1997: Kim Jong Il is named General Secretary of the Workers' Party.
— August 2008: Kim Jong Il reportedly suffers a stroke.
— July 21, 2010: The U.S. imposes new sanctions on North Korea in a bid to stem Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.
— Sept. 28, 2010: Kim Jong Un is promoted to four-star general and given leadership roles in the ruling Workers' Party—moves seen as confirmation that he is slated to become the country's next leader. The announcement is North Korean state media's first mention of Kim Jong Un.
— Oct. 10, 2010: Kim Jong Un makes his public debut at what is believed to be the largest military parade the communist state has ever staged. The celebration in Pyongyang marks the 65th anniversary of the ruling Workers' Party but also serves as a coming-out party for the younger Kim.
— Oct. 11, 2010: Kim Jong Nam, the casino-loving eldest son of Kim Jong Il, says he opposes a hereditary transfer of power to his youngest half-brother. Analysts say Kim Jong Nam spends so much time outside his native land that his opinion carries little weight. He spoke to Japan's TV Asahi in an interview from Beijing.
— Jan. 28, 2011: Kim Jong Nam says his father opposed continuing the family dynasty into a third generation but named his youngest son as heir to keep the country stable, according to TV Asahi.
— Feb. 16, 2011: Kim Jong Il celebrates his 69th birthday.
— April 15, 2011: North Koreans honor the country's founder, Kim Il Sung, on the 99th anniversary of his birth. It is the nation's most important holiday and known as "The Day of the Sun."
— Dec. 18, 2011: Kim Jong Il's death at the age of 69 is announced by state television from Pyongyang.
http://www.yorkdispatch.com/nation/ci_19576499
Kim Jong-Il: leadership and legacy
The death of Kim Jong-Il, the 69-year-old leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), on 17 December 2011, invites assessment of his role in North Korea's modern history and the legacy he has bequeathed to his successor and to North Korea.
Kim Jong-Il assumed power after the death of his father Kim Il-Sung in 1994, at the height of North Korea’s confrontation with the United States over Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons programme, and just as the country was about to plunge into a devastating famine. It was not an auspicious time to become North Korea’s supreme leader.
The younger Kim was then 42 years old, and had been preparing for his succession since his 20s. After his graduation from Kim Il-Sung University in 1964, Kim rose through the ranks of the ruling Korean Workers’ Party, focusing on culture and propaganda. He enjoyed film and the arts, fine food and drink, and kept late hours - and he even candidly admitted to a conference of party workers in 1996 that economics was never his strong suit. But though he lacked the charisma and outgoing personality of his father, he was not the unstable and intellectually vacuous playboy of South Korean propaganda; foreign leaders who met him - including South Korea's president Kim Dae-Jung, Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, and US secretary of state Madeleine Albright - described him as intelligent, well-informed, even charming.
At the same time, many features of Kim Jong-Il's rule - a series of confrontations with the US and the international community over North Korea's nuclear development, and an economic situation that lurched from crisis to crisis - augmented the country’s reputation for unpredictability and provocation. North Korea held two nuclear tests, in 2006 and 2009, in defiance of international condemnation and United Nations sanctions; in 2010, North Korean artillery shelled a South Korean island in a confrontation over South Korean military exercises, an incident that brought the two sides to the brink of open warfare.
Yet if much of the outside world saw Kim Jong-Il as a combination of enigma and rogue, his reputation within North Korea is more difficult to assess. Of course, internal North Korean propaganda built up Kim - as it had his father, who is still widely revered - as a hero of near-superhuman abilities, venerated by all his compatriots. But defectors’ reports suggest the view of Kim within his country is more mixed. Kim Jong-Il is associated both with the trauma of famine and crisis in the late 1990s, and with limited steps toward economic reform in the early 2000s that have since been scaled back.
A more considered judgment will in large part depend on how the DPRK develops in the next period. If North Korea survives and its circumstances improve - perhaps under Kim’s son, Kim Jong-Un - Kim may be remembered as a leader who guided the country through its worst post-war crisis and prepared the way for reform. If things go badly, Kim will be seen as the man who oversaw the unravelling of the system his father built and as the embodiment of a failed dynastic communism.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/charles-k-armstrong/kim-jong-il-leadership-and-legacy