Scores of North Koreans staying abroad, such as diplomats and overseas workers, have attempted to defect to South Korea since North Korea began undoing its COVID-19 border closure last year, a former North Korean diplomat said Tuesday.
Ri Il-gyu, a former counselor of political affairs at the North Korean embassy in Cuba, said there have been more successful defections, but many people were also brutally brought back to North Korea, citing the example of a North Korean woman and her son who were caught during their botched attempt to flee Russia.
“As signs of North Korea’s border reopening were detected from March and April last year, many thought it was time to decide whether to return (to the North) or flee it,” Ri said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency, eight months after defecting to South Korea with his family.
South Korea’s unification ministry said the number of North Korean defectors coming to South Korea reached 196 in 2023, and among them, the number of people with so-called elite backgrou
nds, such as diplomatic and trade officials, came to around 10, the highest since 2017.
Ri’s defection has come under the spotlight as the move came amid intense efforts by South Korea to establish diplomatic relationship with Cuba. In February, the two countries forged formal ties in a surprise decision widely seen as a setback for North Korea, which has long boasted of its brotherly relations with Havana.
Ri is believed to be a veteran diplomat whose total stint in Cuba reached around nine years after joining the North’s foreign ministry in 1999. Since he returned to Cuba as counselor in 2019, his main mission was reportedly to stop Havana from establishing diplomatic ties with Seoul.
“Since 2022, I had informed North Korea’s foreign ministry that there is the possibility of South Korea and Cuba forging formal ties,” he said.
Ri said North Korea decided to permit Cuba’s new ambassador to North Korea to begin his diplomatic duties after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak as part of its desperate efforts to d
eter Havana from setting up ties with Seoul.
Ri said in the months before a party meeting in late 2023, North Korea’s foreign ministry ordered its diplomatic missions to sound out reactions from other nations over the regime’s move to seek a state-to-state relationship with South Korea.
At the year-end party meeting, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared inter-Korean ties as being those between “two states hostile to each other,” and said there is no point seeking reconciliation and unification with South Korea.
Ri struck a skeptical view about North Korea’s resumption of dialogue with South Korea, saying that it may take “at least 10 years” for the North to do so as Kim Jong-un’s pursuit of a state-to-state relationship with the South apparently came out of a “strategic” decision.
Touching on the United States, Ri said North Korea appears to be “eagerly” looking forward to former U.S. President Donald Trump’s reelection in the November presidential election.
At a speech to accept the official Republi
can nomination last week, Trump boasted of his personal ties with Kim Jong-un and signaled his apparent desire to resume dialogue with Pyongyang, if he returns to office.
During his first term, Trump held talks with the North’s leader three times, but denuclearization talks between Washington and Pyongyang have been stalled since their no-deal summit in Hanoi in February 2019.
In regard to the North’s ties with China, Ri said it seems to be “obvious” that Pyongyang-Beijing relations have become somewhat “estranged” since late 2022, in contrast to Pyongyang’s deepening military and other cooperation with Russia.
“For North Korea, it is not a top priority to recover its ties with China. The North’s primary goal is to elicit the maximum benefit from Russia and map out its strategies to brace for Trump’s possible return,” he said.
Ri saw a low possibility of North Korea’s sudden collapse as its system, based on tight surveillance, has put its people into living under a reign of terror.
“But dictatorship has
never been maintained forever and it will collapse someday. We should not just wait for it, but it would be our mission to accelerate such a process,” he added.
Source: Yonhap News Agency
