SEOUL, South Korea — 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 capital of South Korea. “The traditional structures of the
North Korean system are crumbling.”
Mr. Thae had been the
North’s No. 2 diplomat in London until he fled to the South last
summer with his family. South Korea has hailed his defection as a sign of
growing disillusionment among North Korean elites with the country’s leader, Kim
Jong-un. Since December, Mr. Thae has given a series of interviews to share his
dire view of today’s North Korea.Mr. Thae’s diagnosis of
Mr. Kim’s rule is hardly new. Defectors from the North, as well as some
conservative analysts and policy makers in the South, widely share that view.
Still, it signaled a drastic change of roles for Mr. Thae. Before his defection, he
was a career diplomat, fluent in English, who had served in Britain, Denmark
and Sweden, often delivering passionate speeches glorifying the Kim family that
has ruled North Korea for seven decades.
In the South, Mr. Thae, now affiliated
with the Institute for National Security Strategy, a think tank arm of the
National Intelligence Service, has vowed to spend the rest of his life trying
to bring down the North Korean regime. Mr. Thae said he had high
expectations when Mr. Kim took power after the death of his father, Kim
Jong-il, in 2011. Schooled for several years in Switzerland, Mr. Kim was
expected to help modernize his impoverished country. Instead, he resorted to a
“reign of terror” by executing scores of officials, including his uncle Jang
Song-thaek, whom he thought posed a challenge to his power, Mr. Thae said.
The former diplomat said
he had come up with a detailed plan for his defection, first ensuring that his
two sons joined him and his wife in London. (North Korean diplomats are
required to leave a child in the North, a measure intended to prevent their
defection.) He declined to reveal details of his defection plan and the
circumstances. While in London, his sons
began asking questions, like why the North Korean government executed people in
public without a proper trial, Mr. Thae said. Their English friends taunted
them with questions, like why Mr. Kim had smoked a cigarette inside a
nursery.
The day Mr. Thae broached
his plan for defection with his sons, he told them that he wanted to break the
“chain of slavery” for them, he recalled. They wanted to know if they would
have free access to the internet, books and movies in the South, he said. The best way to force
change in the isolated North, he continued, is to disseminate outside
information there to help ordinary citizens eventually rebel. South Korean TV
dramas and movies smuggled from China are already popular in the North, he
said.
Another 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, he added.
The spread of outside
news and market activities could eventually doom Mr. Kim because his regime
“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.” But the leader’s efforts
to clamp down on information and products from outside North Korea have been
unsuccessful because the police accept bribes in exchange for freeing smugglers
and people caught watching banned movies and dramas.
“Kim Jong-un’s days are
numbered,” Mr. Thae said on Wednesday.
After months of
debriefing by the authorities in South Korea, Mr. Thae used meetings with the
cuontry’s politicians and the news media to suggest that North Korea was
determined to be recognized as a nuclear power, just as India and Pakistan
are. In the past year, the
North has conducted two nuclear tests and has launched more than 20 ballistic
missiles, and it has openly vowed to develop the ability to hit the United
States with a nuclear warhead.
“It won’t happen,” Donald
J. Trump, then president-elect, said at the time. During the election campaign,
Mr. Trump had said he was willing to sit down with Mr. Kim and perhaps have a
hamburger with him.On Wednesday, Mr. Thae
warned against compromising with the North, arguing that sanctions were
effective. In recent interviews with local news outlets, he said that North
Korea had lost annual income worth tens of millions dollars, after Britain
froze accounts last year held by its state-run insurance company as part of
sanctions recommended by the United Nations. Until then, the company had
claimed large insurance payments through fabricated documents, he said.
Mr. Kim wanted to
negotiate a compromise, under which the United States and South Korea would
cancel their joint annual joint military exercises and lift sanctions on the
North in return for a moratorium on North Korean missile and nuclear tests, Mr.
Thae said. But such a deal would
validate Mr. Kim’s argument that he had been forced to develop nuclear
weapons as a reaction to American hostility, he said. that is really a
trap Kim Jong-un wants,” Mr. Thae said.
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