Category: Kim Jong Un

Diplomat: “I’ve known that there was no future for North Korea for a long time”

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The decision that North Korean diplomat Thae Yong-ho made to defect from a regime he had spent his whole life defending did not happen overnight. His misgivings had been simmering for two decades, even as he went around Europe espousing the superiority of the North Korean system.  “I’ve known that there was no future for North Korea for a long time,” Thae told The Washington Post.

In the 1990s, as a relatively young diplomat, Thae Yong-ho was posted to Denmark, where his youngest son was born, and after that to Sweden. In Scandinavia, home to the flagbearers of European socialism, Thae’s eyes began to open. “During my first foreign posting in Denmark, I came to doubt and question whether North Korea could say that it was a true socialist or communist system,” he said.  “North Korean society doesn’t have the concept of comparing,” he said. “The more time you spend in the outside world, the disbelief in your system grows more and more.”

During this second stint in London, in the second year of Kim Jong Un’s regime, Thae’s concerns started to become unbearable. “Not only me but other North Korean elites were hopeful that because Kim Jong Un had studied abroad and was young, he might change the policy direction and modernize North Korea,” he said. But his doubts heightened after Kim had his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, executed at the end of 2013. Although executions are not rare in North Korea, there was something disturbingly arbitrary about this one, Thae said.

Still, he continued his duties in London, voicing the idea that North Korea was a “people’s paradise” with free housing, health care and education. But at home, Thae’s youngest son, who was still in high school and hoped to study computer science at a top London university, was asking why North Korea doesn’t allow the Internet, why North Koreans are not allowed to watch foreign films, why North Koreans can’t read any books they want. “As a father, it was hard for me to tell lies, and it started a debate within the family,” Thae said.

Last July, after much preparation and as the end of his posting was approaching, Thae defected with his wife and both their sons.

[Washington Post]

Kim Jong Un would like to meet Trump

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Thae Yong Ho, who was number two in the North Korean embassy in London before defecting with his family, says after his initial surprise that President Donald Trump won the US election, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un now sees it as “a good opportunity for him to open a kind of compromise with the new American administration.”

But Thae insists Kim will only talk on his terms, pointing to the leader’s New Year’s Address. In the address, Kim made it clear that if the US continued its current policy against North Korea, he would continue to add nuclear weapons to the country’s military capability.

During his campaign, President Trump said he would be open to meeting Kim.* Thae makes a plea for the president to reconsider, saying it would give the North Korean leader legitimacy he currently doesn’t have in his own country.

“Even Chinese President Xi Jinping and even Russian President Putin — they haven’t even met Kim Jong Un,” he says.

Thae claims that despite commanding loyalty through fear, Kim is still struggling to secure the legitimacy enjoyed by his father Kim Jong Il and grandfather Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea.

[CNN]

*As a candidate, Donald Trump called North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un a “bad dude” and a “maniac,” but also offered to meet him over a hamburger to discuss how the two nations might get along peacefully.

North Korean sanctions have been taking effect says diplomat defector

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Thae Yong Ho, who was number two in the North Korean embassy in London before defecting with his family, says sanctions passed last March by the United Nations Security Council against North Korea — described at the time as “ground-breaking” and “unprecedented” — are working.

Thae says Kim Jong Un had wanted to establish 14 special economic zones inside North Korea and set up two ministries to encourage foreign investment, but these two ministries have since been dissolved.

He also says the sanctions are a “very, very strong factor” in the North Korean economy and have a “psychological effect on North Korean people and high ranking officials.”

But they’re not enough.

In keeping with President Trump’s line, Thae says China needs to be persuaded to do more. He says it needs to prevent natural resources being smuggled across the border from North Korea for cash, and also has to take North Korea’s nuclear program more seriously.

Thae even goes one step further — saying that nuclear weapons aren’t only a threat to the US and South Korea. “According to international geopolitics there is no eternal enemy or friend… nobody can predict if one day Kim Jong Un may want to blackmail China,” he says.

[CNN]

Diplomat defector: “Greatest threat to the North Korean government is information”

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Thae Yong-ho, North Korea’s former deputy ambassador in London who defected to South Korea in July, says the greatest threat to the North Korean government is information from the outside world, not only critical news reports and oppositional political messages, but also movies and TV series that show how the outside world has developed.

“North Korea will collapse on its own when enough external information introduced through the internet reveals the truth of the Kim regime to the residents,” he said.

The advocacy group Human Rights Watch has criticized Kim for tightening controls on citizens through the country’s borders, increasing efforts to restrict expression and preventing outside information from entering the country.

[VoA]

Top North Korean defector says information flow will help bring down Kim Jong Un

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What makes North Korea feel so oppressive? If you ask its highest-ranking defector in decades, the answer is censorship. Thae Yong Ho, who was until last summer a Pyongyang envoy in London, argues that increasing the flow of information into the North is what can sow the seeds of popular discord to bring down the Kim Jong Un regime.

In North Korea, fewer than 1 percent of the population has Internet access. Foreign books, films and information are banned — and TV only broadcasts propaganda. Breaking down the censorship and surveillance state from within, Thae believes, is the only way to bring down North Korea’s nuclear weapons-obsessed leader.

With information comes education, Thae says — and that can lead to a popular uprising. “Once they are educated to that level, I am sure they will stand up,” Thae told reporters.

A shortwave radio station called Free North Korea Radio has been delivering information from outside the country since 2005, broadcasting from the second floor of a multipurpose building just outside Seoul. “The power of radio has been huge in advancing the cause of freedom and human rights,” says Suzanne Scholte, head of the American group that partners with the station.

This kind of tactic is far more effective than any military action, Thae, the defector, said. And the power of information explains why the Pyongyang regime is so resistant to moves like propaganda loudspeakers on the border, he said. The many tactics to spread information into the North are working, he said. “The leaflets, USBs with films [stored on them] can be introduced to North Korea. So the ways of educating North Korean people for people’s uprising is also evolving,” Thae said.

[NPR]

Diplomat defector: “Kim Jong-un’s days are numbered”

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The highest-ranking defector from North Korea in years said on Wednesday that the days of the country’s leadership were “numbered,” and that its attempts to control outside information were not working because of corruption and discontent.

“I am sure that more defections of my colleagues will take place, since North Korea is already on a slippery slope,” the defector, Thae Yong-ho, said during a news conference in Seoul. “The traditional structures of the North Korean system are crumbling.”

One sign of Mr. Kim’s weakening control, Mr. Thae said, is evident at the unofficial markets in North Korea where women trade goods, mostly smuggled from China. The vendors used to be called “grasshoppers” because they would pack and flee whenever they saw the police approaching. Now, they are called “ticks” because they refuse to budge, demanding a right to make a living, Mr. Thae said.

Such resistance, even if small in scale, is unprecedented. The spread of outside news and market activities could eventually doom Mr. Kim because his government “can be held in place and maintained only by idolizing Kim Jong-un like a god,” Mr. Thae said. “If he tries to introduce a market-oriented economy to North Korean society, then there will be no place for Kim Jong-un in North Korea, and he knows that.”

“Kim Jong-un’s days are numbered,” Mr. Thae said on Wednesday.

[New York Times]

Time for regime change in North Korea?

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From an Opinion piece by Lee Min-Yon,  a professor at Sookmyung Women’s University and the chief advisor of the Sookmyung Research Institute of Global Governance in Seoul, Korea:

There is a growing international consensus that the key to dealing with North Korea is regime change in the country.

The amount and degree of sanctions imposed on Pyongyang is regarded as the strongest ever. In 2016, the Third Committee of the General Assembly, which handles humanitarian affairs in the UN, unanimously adopted yet another resolution, calling for sending North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for human rights violations in North Korea.

The General Assembly acknowledged that North Korea is subject to most of the provisions regarding crimes against humanity stipulated in Article 7(1) of the Rome Statute of the ICC and added state-induced starvation of its citizens to the list of accusations. According to annual reports of the World Food Programme, North Korea is one of the four countries that suffer the worst chronic food shortages in the world. In 1990, about 5 million people suffered hunger in the country.

Now that five years have passed since Kim Jong Un took power, he is considered as even more tyrannical and vicious than the previous leaders. The acquired sins created by Kim himself are as follows: inhumane purges and tortures, including the killing of his uncle Jang Song Thaek and top military officers with anti-aircraft guns; and, aggressive and intensive threats and provocations, including the bombardment of Yeonpyeong Island of South Korea, nuclear tests and missile launches. While it took seven years for Pyongyang to conduct its third nuclear test, Kim carried out the fourth and fifth nuclear tests in 2016 following the third nuclear test in 2013. There have been 37 missile tests since Kim came to power, which is far more frequent than those during the reigns of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

Experts are having meaningless debates about when the country would cease to exist. Rather, the international community should talk about regime change in Pyongyang, as UN sanctions resolutions on North Korea have already provided the justification and rationalization.

 [Read full article]

The only way to change North Korea’s destiny is to change its leader

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The only way to change North Korea’s destiny is to change its leader, says Thae Yong Ho the most senior North Korean diplomat to defect in almost 20 years.

“As long as Kim Jong Un is in power, there’ll be no chance for the world to improve the human rights issue” or cancel “the nuclear program,” he says.

Thae’s initial hopes that Kim’s youth and overseas studies would make him a reformer were soon destroyed as he saw more and more of his fellow high-ranking officials being executed, almost, he says, on a whim.

“If Kim Jong Un decides to kill someone, if he thinks that he is a threat or he scared him, he just wants to get rid of him, that is the present reality of North Korea,” he says, adding that he knows more elites will defect.

A South Korean think-tank affiliated with the country’s intelligence agency (INSS) assesses at least 340 people have been ordered to be executed since Kim took power in December 2011.

[CNN]

Defected diplomat says international criticism of North Korean human rights undermines Kim Jong Un

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Thae Yong-ho, North Korea’s former deputy ambassador in London who defected to South Korea in July, says clashing with Pyongyang over its nuclear program has strengthened Kim Jong Un’s leadership, but continued human rights criticism and increased information from the outside world will over time lead to the downfall of the authoritarian and repressive regime.

Thae says the leadership in Pyongyang is unwilling to give up its nuclear program, and  its defiance in the face of U.S.-led pressure has helped solidify internal popular support and earned the leadership a degree of international respect. “Some countries are interested in following North Korea’s path to become nuclear powers themselves. Therefore, North Korean diplomats retain their dignity despite the criticisms of the international community,” Thae said.

He says, however, international criticism about human rights abuses in North Korea undermines Kim’s standing in the world and with his own people.

Thae says North Korean diplomats have faced denunciations from allies and adversaries alike over Pyongyang’s human rights record, but the leadership is more concerned about how this kind of criticism could damage the carefully nurtured public image of Kim as a near-infallible leader.

“It is not easy for North Koreans to understand the concepts of the ICC or human rights. But they will be greatly interested if they hear that Kim Jong Un will be tried at the international court. It will be a direct sign that Kim Jong Un is a criminal and his regime has no future,” he said.

[VoA]

North Korean diplomat says more diplomats poised to defect

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More high-level North Korean diplomats are waiting to defect to South Korea from their overseas posts in Europe, Pyongyang’s former deputy ambassador to London said on Tuesday, according to the Yonhap News Agency.

Thae Yong Ho defected to South Korea in August last year and since December 2016 has been speaking to local media and appearing on variety television shows to discuss his defection to Seoul and his life as a North Korean envoy.

“A significant number of North Korean diplomats came to South Korea recently,” Thae said, according to Yonhap. “I am not the only one from Europe. There are more waiting to come,” Thae said, speaking at an event held in South Korea’s parliamentary building.

Thae, 54, has said publicly that dissatisfaction with the rule of young leader Kim Jong Un had led him to flee his post, but he also had two university-age sons living with him and his wife in London who were due to return to isolated North Korea.

He is the highest-ranking official to have fled North Korea for the South since the 1997 defection of Hwang Jang Yop, the brains behind North Korea’s governing ideology, “Juche”, which combines Marxism with extreme nationalism.

“Of all the recent high-level defectors, I am the only one to have gone public,” said Thae.

[Reuters]