SEOUL, South Korea (PA) – A North Korean diplomat who served as the country’s ambassador to Kuwait has moved to South Korea, according to South Korean lawmakers who were briefed by the Seoul intelligence agency.
Ha Tae-keung, a Conservative opposition lawmaker and executive secretary of the National Assembly’s intelligence committee, said on Tuesday that officials from the National Intelligence Service told him that the diplomat arrived in South Korea in September 2019 with his wife. and at least one child.
That would make him one of the oldest North Koreans to fail in recent years. North Korea, which presents itself as a socialist paradise, is extremely sensitive to desertion, especially among its elite, and has sometimes insisted that there are South Korean or American plots 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, escaped on a South Korean diplomatic mission, but that intelligence officials did not specify where. Ha said the intelligence officials did not provide specific details as to why Ryu decided to malfunction.
The office of Kim Byung-kee, a member of the ruling Liberal Party and the other executive secretary of the intelligence committee, said he was told Ryu now lives in South Korea. Kim’s assistants did not elaborate further.
NIS and the South Korean Unification Ministry, which deals with inter-Korean affairs, did not independently confirm Ryu’s failure when he reached The Associated Press.
The Kuwaiti Ministry of Information did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A cell phone number associated with the North Korean Embassy rang unanswered on Tuesday.
The North Korean state media has not yet commented on Ryu’s situation.
While North Korea has expressed anger over high-profile failures in the past, it has also been known to remain silent when deserters remain low-profile – such as the 2018 defection of its former ambassador to the United States. Italy – in part to avoid highlighting the vulnerabilities of his government.
North Korea has long used its diplomats to develop sources of money abroad, and experts say it is possible that deserted diplomats have struggled to respond to financial demands from home authorities.
North Korea’s long-managed economy has been devastated by US-led sanctions on its nuclear program, which strengthened significantly in 2016 and 2017 amid a challenging series of nuclear and weapons tests.
The failures of senior North Korean diplomats could reflect a growing sense of uncertainty among the country’s elite about the nation’s future under a third-generation dynasty obsessed with nuclear weapons, said Shin Beomchul, an analyst at the Korean Strategy Research Institute. and a former South Korean diplomat.
“The economic situation in the north has significantly worsened since the sanctions of 2016 and 2017, and instead of pursuing reforms and openings to the outside world, the leadership is doubling in terms of increasing political control,” Shin said. “This inspires questions about the future of the elite and, when they have the chance, they try to escape.”
However, Shin said it would be premature to take the failures as a sign that the weakening of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s control over his regime.
In recent speeches, Kim promised to strengthen his nuclear arsenal and reaffirm greater state control over the economy and society. Experts say Kim’s comments were partly aimed at putting pressure on the administration of new US President Joe Biden, following his country’s economic downturn amid pandemic closures and his failure to obtain a waiver of sanctions that have never materialized. his diplomacy with former US President Donald Trump.
The Embassy of North Korea in Kuwait is the country’s only diplomatic outpost in the Gulf region. North Korea once had thousands of workers working in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates before the United Nations stepped up sanctions against labor exports from North Korea, which had been a major source of foreign income 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 United Arab Emirates has said it has expelled all North Korean workers by the end of December 2019. Oman and Qatar have not provided updates from 2019 and 2018, respectively.
In September 2017, the Kuwaiti government expelled the North Korean ambassador and four other diplomats following North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests. After that, Ryu intervened as acting ambassador.
It appears that Ryu fled a few months after North Korea’s interim ambassador to Italy Jo Song Gil disappeared with his wife in late 2018. Ha and other lawmakers told reporters last year that they found out Jo was living in South Korea under government protection after arriving in July 2019.
Jo was probably the highest-ranking North Korean official to fail in the South since the arrival in 1997 of a senior Labor Party official who once tutored leader Kim Jong Un’s father, late leader Kim Jong Il .
Tae Young Ho, a former minister at the North Korean Embassy in London who moved to South Korea in 2016 and was elected to parliament representing Ha’s party last year, said in a Facebook post that Ryu’s desertion will shock members because he seems to be the son-in-law of Jon Il Chun, who once oversaw a ruling party office that handled the Kim family’s secret money operations. The Associated Press could not independently verify Tae’s claim.
More than 33,000 North Koreans have left South Korea since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, according to South Korean government records. Many deserters have said they are escaping harsh political suppression and poverty, while elites such as the Tae have expressed resentment over the country’s dynastic leadership.
Tae said he decided to flee because he did not want his children to live “miserable” lives in North Korea and was disappointed by Kim Jong Un, whom he said had terrorized North Korean elites with executions and purges. while consolidating his power and aggressively pursued nuclear weapons.
North Korea called the Tae “human waste” and accused it of embezzling government money and committing other crimes without providing specific evidence.
___
Dubai Associated Press writer Jon Gambrell contributed to this report.