The 17-year-old grandson of late North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il granted a TV interview providing a rare look at a member of the secretive Kim family dynasty.

"I've always dreamed that one day I would go back and make things better and make it easier for the people there," Kim Han Sol said in the interview posted on YouTube.

Kim Han Sol grew up with one foot in a privileged international community on Macau and the other in North Korea, a country known for persistent hunger and political repression under the rule of his grandfather and great grandfather.

The teen appeared articulate and impeccably dressed in a 20 minute English-language interview with reporter Elisabeth Rehn, a former United Nations official and Finnish defense minister. It originally aired on Finnish television and was uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday, according a report by Radio Free Europe.

Kim Han Sol, a student at the UN-sponsored World College in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, is the son of Kim Jong Nam — the eldest of Kim Jong Il’s sons and once viewed as the favorite to inherit power in the authoritarian North of the Korean peninsula. But the aging dictator instead handed the reins to Kim Jong Un, his youngest son, who is believed to be about 28.

According to the interview, Kim Han Sol’s family moved to Macau a few years after he was born, but he visited North Korea in the summers, spending time with his mother's relatives, whom he described as "ordinary" citizens. But he said he was isolated from other Korean kids and was never told that his grandfather was the country's ruler.

Interview with Kim Hon Sol, segment one

Interview with Kim Hon Sol, segment two

"Little by little, through conversations that my parents had, I started to put the puzzle pieces together," he said, and a little wistfully, described how he wished to meet his grandfather.

"I was actually waiting for him before he passed away, hoping that he would come find me because I really didn’t know if he knew that I existed," Kim told the interviewer.

Kim's father Kim Jong Nam has occasionally surfaced to speak to the international press in Macau, sharing his view that his home country needs economic reforms and cannot survive under a dynastic succession. In the past year, the South Korean press reported, Kim Jong Nam has dropped out of sight again.

Kim Han Sol avoided media coverage when he first started at school last fall and was mobbed by cameras and reporters.

In the Finnish television interview, he said he has come to feel at home in the multicultural setting of his school and spends "hours and hours" in the evenings chatting with friends from around the world about how to resolve their respective conflicts back home.

It had been "quite an interesting experience" having a roommate from Libya, he said, "especially when the (2011) revolution happened, he was really enthusiastic about it," Kim Han Sol said. "He told me many stories about how he went home… and saw a different Libya."

The uprising against long-time leader Moammar Gadhafi finally forced the dictator from power in August 2011. Gadhafi, who fled Tripoli, was later found hiding in southern Libya, and killed shortly after at the hands of revolutionary forces.

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AFP - Getty Images file

Kim Jong Nam, the eldest son of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. The photo was photo taken June 4, 2010 as he was talking to members of the South Korean press about the need for the North to reform in order to avert economic collapse, and the end of its political regime. He lives mainly in Macau.

Prosecutors in South Korea have filed spying charges against a North Korean who they say was involved in plotting to assassinate Kim Jong Nam — the wayward son of former dictator Kim Jong Il — the French news agency AFP reported.

The authorities said the suspected spy arrived in South Korea in the spring posing as a defector who fled the communist-ruled North by way of China, the report said.

When his identity was exposed, he confessed to being part of a failed plot to stage a hit-and-run car accident in China in 2010 targeting Kim Jong Nam, who lives mainly in the Chinese territory of Macau, the report said.

South Korea's Chosun Ilbo reported that when the man was arrested in late September he told authorities that he was under instructions to settle in South Korea and await orders. He later said he was ordered to seek out Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector-turned-activist who sends anti-Pyongyang messages across the border to North Korea via helium balloons.

Kim Jong Nam is the eldest of four known offspring of Kim Jong Il and has been living mainly in the Chinese gambling mecca of Macau for more than a decade. He has also been spotted periodically in Beijing where he reportedly owns another home.

Jong Nam is thought to have fallen out of favor with his father and his secretive regime in 2001, when he botched an effort to enter Japan on a false passport, reportedly because he wanted to visit Tokyo's Disneyland.

His younger half-brother, Kim Jung Un, thought to be about 28, has assumed the top positions in North Korea's government, Communist party and military after their father’s death in late 2011.

Kim Jong Nam has spoken to members of the international press corps on occasion, discussing the need for economic reform in North Korea and asserting his opinion that the dynastic succession will not work in his homeland.

South Korea’s press has recently noted that Kim Jong Nam has largely disappeared from the public eye since shortly after his father’s death in December 2011.

Kim Jong Un is the third in the family to rule the isolated totalitarian country following his father and grandfather Kim Il Sung.

Three years of fighting between China-backed North Korea and U.S.-backed South Korea ended with an armistice in 1953, but the two sides are technically still at war and divided by a demilitarized zone near the 38^th parallel.

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Kim Jong Nam, the eldest son of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, waves after an interview with South Korean media in the Chinese territory of Macau in June 2010.

Kim Jong Nam, the wayward eldest son of former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, has been kicked out of his luxury lodgings in the gambling mecca of Macau after failing to pay $15,000 in arrears, according to a report Friday by the Russian news website Arguments and Facts.

Jong Nam, 41, was bypassed by his father as the next leader of North Korea. Kim Jung Un, a half-brother to Jong Nam who is thought to be about 28, was instead anointed to head the isolated Communist nation upon his father’s death in December.

Jong Nam has been living in comfortable virtual exile for about a decade -- gaining a reputation for drinking and gambling while staying mainly in the Chinese territory of Macau.

Arguments and Facts, a mass circulation news weekly and website, reported that he was renting at least one place at Macau’s five-star Grand Lapa Hotel, which is run by the Mandarin Oriental Group, but quoted a source at the hotel as saying that he was expelled from the 17^th floor room because his credit card had been canceled.

Jong-Nam’s luxury apartment was paid for by Beijing, according to an unnamed Macau administration official cited by the Russian site, while his spending money came mainly from Pyongyang.

The report speculated that Pyongyang had cut Kim’s cash, and that Beijing followed suit, after he said unflattering things about the secretive regime.

In January, Tokyo Shimbun quoted Kim Jong Nam expressing his opposition to hereditary leadership in North Korea and openly doubting that the regime could survive. The reporter, Yoji Gomi, interviewed Jong Nam extensively for a recently published book, "My father Kim Jong Il and Me."

North Korea's first family

The Macau official also said that the local administration was nervous about Kim Jong Nam’s presence in Macau, fearing that he might become a target of the Pyongyang regime, according to the report.

"Who knows what might happen to him," the official told Arguments and Facts. "What if there is an assassination attempt against him, a blast or a contract killing? We do not need problems."

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