High profile North Korean defector Thae Yong-ho has an interesting interview with Yonhap News where he describes what it is like to be an overseas diplomat for North Korea:
Five years into North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s reign this past summer, Thae Yong-ho, a senior North Korean diplomat, concluded that he had had enough of the iron fist rule of the three Kim generations.
Despite the Kim regime’s notorious restrictions on the inflow of outside news, he, like other North Korean elites, was aware of the wide disparity between how North Korea looked from the inside and out.
The disparity was felt more acutely for Thae who, as a diplomat, was allowed free access to the Internet, a privilege given exceptionally to diplomats who have to fend off any external criticism of the communist regime.
“The first thing North Korean diplomats based overseas do at work is open the homepage of (South Korea’s) Yonhap News Agency whose North Korea section compiles all the local and foreign news involving North Korea. Even what I said today will be read by every North Korean diplomat who is outside of the country,” Thae said at a press meeting on Tuesday.
The Internet also connected him to the vast pool of South Korean media content involving fellow North Koreans who risked their lives to escape the socialist country and have successfully settled down in the South.
The 1950-53 Korean War divided the Koreas into two ideologically different countries and the rivalry has continued to today, with more than 30,000 North Koreans defecting to South Korea between the early 1960s until recently. Only a small number of South Koreans have deserted their country to become North Korean.
“I got to know the superiority of democracy and witnessed the democratization (of other countries) from the Internet, and realized that the North Korean regime has no future,” he said, recalling how he finally made the decision to desert.
“As the Kim Jong-un regime took power, I had a slight hope that he would make a rational, reasonable regime because he must be well aware of how the world runs after he studied overseas for a long time,” Thae said. But Kim turned out even more merciless than his father and late leader Kim Jong-il, he said, citing the shocking public execution of the leader’s once-powerful uncle Jang Song-thaek in 2013 as one of the moments of awakening that eventually solidified his decision to defect. [Yonhap]
You can read the rest at the link to include the fact that an ambassador makes about $900 – $1,100 a month which requires them to conduct outside activities to earn money to survive as well as to send foreign currency back to the Kim regime. As I read the article I wonder what illegal activities he was part of in the UK? I would think that whatever schemes the embassy in the UK had going on Thae has already briefed intelligence agencies on to get them shut down.
