With the death anniversary of Pyongyang’s late leader Kim Jong-il just one day away, North Korea on Tuesday revved up efforts to honor him as a “trailblazer” of Korean unification.

Wednesday will mark the third death anniversary of Kim, whose iron-fisted rule and nuclear weapons program stoked regional tensions for more than a decade.

Kim died of heart failure on Dec. 17, 2011, passing power onto his youngest son and the current leader, Kim Jong-un. He was 69 and had ruled the country for 17 years.

Four out of six pages of the Rodong Sinmun, an organ of the North’s Workers’ Party of Korea, were dedicated to observe the occasion and extol the late leader’s efforts to reunify the Koreas.

Kim Jong-il opened the “June 15 era of reunification” after successfully holding the first inter-Korean summit in 2000, the newspaper said, referring to him as “our benevolent teacher and the Sun of national unification.”

The paper also featured photos of commemorative stamps and tributes from WPK members and workers in Hamhung, the North’s second-largest city in the northeast where the late leader made his last field guidance trip.

The North’s official news wire Korean Central News Agency, meanwhile, praised the late leader as the “hero of the century” and said he was remembered by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

South Korean officials predicted that Kim Jong-un will likely use the occasion to highlight his own accomplishments.

“The (WPK’s) love for the people has grown stronger as Kim Jong-un visited various parts of the country for field guidance hundreds of times,” the KCNA reported a day earlier.

“As you can see from recent articles on the North’s state-run media, Kim Jong-un will probably call people’s attention to his own achievements at the ceremony marking his father’s death,” an official at the South’s unification ministry said, asking not to be named as per office policy.

The 1950-53 Korean War ended in a ceasefire, not a peace treaty, leaving the rival Koreas technically in a state of war. (Yonhap)