List of leaders of North Korea
At the end of World War II, Soviet Union occupied the northern half of Korea and in 1946 established the Provisional People's Committee for North Korea chaired by Kim Il-sung. On 9 September 1948, the DPRK was proclaimed, also led by Kim Il-sung.
Jang Song-thaek
Analysts of North Korean politics agreed that Jang's execution was the most significant since purges carried out in the 1950s by Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-un's grandfather and North Korea's founder; since 1960, purged top officials have not usually been killed, and the denunciations of purged figures have not typically been so extreme and public. Professor Charles K. Armstrong, an expert on North Korea at Columbia University, stated that "although high-ranking leaders, including members of the Kim family, have been deposed before, we haven't seen anything this public or dramatic since Kim Jong-un's grandfather Kim Il-sung purged his last major rivals in the late 1950s. This seems to indicate the divisions within the Kim regime were more serious than previously thought." Former U.S. National Security Council director for Asian affairs Victor Cha said that the purge and execution of Jang "tells you that everything's not normal ... When you take out Jang, you're not taking out just one person – you're taking out scores if not hundreds of other people in the system. It's got to have some ripple effect."