SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – A North Korean diplomat who served as the country’s acting ambassador to Kuwait has defected to South Korea, according to South Korean lawmakers informed by Seoul’s spy agency.
Ha Tae-keung, a conservative opposition lawmaker and executive secretary of the National Assembly’s intelligence committee, said on Tuesday that National Intelligence officials told him that in September 2019, the diplomat met with his wife and at least one child in South Africa. -Korea arrived. .
That would make him one of the most senior North Koreans to have broken in recent years. North Korea, which sees itself as a socialist paradise, is extremely sensitive about apostasy, especially among its elite, and has sometimes insisted that it is South Korean or American conspiracies to undermine its government.
Ha said he was told that the diplomat, who changed his name to Ryu Hyun-woo after arriving in the South, had escaped through a South Korean diplomatic mission, but that the spy officials did not specify where. . Ha said espionage officers did not provide specific details as to why Ryu decided to defect.
The office of Kim Byung-kee, a lawmaker from the ruling Liberal Party and the other executive secretary of the intelligence committee, said he was also told that Ryu now lives in South Korea. Kim’s help did not expand further.
The Ministry of Unification of the NIS and South Korea, which deals with inter-Korean affairs, did not confirm independently of Ryu when the Associated Press reached it.
The Kuwaiti Information Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A phone number that was once attached to the North Korean embassy there called unanswered on Tuesday.
North Korean state media have not yet commented on Ryu’s situation.
While North Korea has in the past expressed anger over some notable absences, it is also known that it remains silent as abductors keep a low profile – such as the abduction in 2018 of its former acting ambassador to Italy – in part to prevent the vulnerabilities of his government.
North Korea has long used its diplomats to develop money abroad, and experts said it is possible that overflowing diplomats struggled to meet financial demands from the authorities at home.
North Korea’s long mismanaged economy has been devastated by US – led sanctions over its nuclear program, which strengthened significantly in 2016 and 2017 amid a challenging series of nuclear and weapons tests.
The failures by senior North Korean diplomats could reflect a growing sense of uncertainty among the country’s elite over the country’s future under a third-generation dynasty devoted to nuclear weapons, said Shin Beomchul, an analyst at the Korean research institute for Korean research for national strategy, said and a former South Korean diplomat.
“The North’s economic situation has deteriorated significantly due to the 2016 and 2017 sanctions, and instead of pursuing reforms and openings to the outside world, the leadership is doubling its political control,” Shin said. “It raises questions about the future among the elite, and if they have the chance, they try to escape.”
Shin, however, said it would be premature to take the overflows as a sign that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s grip on his rule is weakening.
In recent speeches, Kim has vowed to bolster his nuclear arsenal and restore greater state control over the economy and society. According to experts, Kim’s comments were aimed in part at putting pressure on the administration of the new US president, Joe Biden, after he saw his country’s economy collapse in the midst of pandemic – activated border closures and his failure to ease sanctions. obtained that never came out of his diplomacy with former US President Donald Trump.
The North Korean embassy in Kuwait City is the country’s only diplomatic outpost in the Gulf region. North Korea once had thousands of workers in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates before the United Nations tightened sanctions against North Korean labor exports, which were a major source of foreign revenue for the North.
In a letter to the United Nations in March 2020, Kuwait said it had stopped issuing work permits to North Koreans and expelled those working in the country. The UAE said it had expelled all North Korean workers by the end of December 2019. Oman and Qatar have not provided updates since 2019 and 2018 respectively.
In September 2017, the Kuwaiti government suspended the North Korean ambassador and four other diplomats following North Korean nuclear and missile tests. Ryu reportedly stepped in as acting ambassador.
It appears that Ryu fled months ago after North Korea’s acting ambassador to Italy, Jo Song Gil, disappeared with his wife at the end of 2018. Ha and other lawmakers told reporters last year that they heard Jo was living in South Korea under government protection after arriving in July 2019. .
Jo may have been the highest-level North Korean official who has migrated to the South since the arrival in 1997 of a senior Labor official, who taught former leader Kim Jong Un’s father, the late leader Kim Jong Il. .
Tae Young Ho, formerly a minister at the North Korean embassy in London, who defected to South Korea in 2016 and was elected last year as a lawmaker representing Ha’s party, said in a Facebook post that Ryu’s apostasy would shock members of the North Korean ruling elite. because he is apparently the son-in-law of Jon Il Chun, who once oversaw a ruling party bureau that handled the secret money operations of the Kim family. The Associated Press could not independently confirm Tae’s claim.
More than 33,000 North Koreans have migrated to South Korea since the end of the Korean War from 1950 to 53, according to South Korean government reports. Many defectors said they were escaping hard political oppression and poverty, while elites like Tae expressed resentment over the country’s dynastic leadership.
Tae said he decided to flee because he did not want his children to lead a miserable life in North Korea and that he was disappointed with Kim Jong Un, who he said was the North Korean elite with executions and purges. terrorized while consolidating power and aggressively. nuclear weapons pursued.
North Korea called Tae ‘human scum’ and accused him of embezzling government money and committing other crimes, without giving specific evidence.
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Associated Press author Jon Gambrell in Dubai contributed to this report.