SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — When Ri Il Gyu, North Korea’s No.2 diplomat in Cuba, finally decided to flee to South Korea in frustration over his highly repressive, corrupt homeland last November, he finished all necessary prep work alone. About a week later, one night, he told his family that they should leave Cuba in six hours.
“My wife first told me not to have a dreadful joke. So I showed her our plane tickets (that I had bought) and she couldn’t say words,” Ri said in an interview with The Associated Press on Friday. “I told my kid that there is no future or hope for North Korea.”
His family eventually followed him to go to a Havana airport at dawn next day, taking a flight to a third country and then South Korea in one of the most high-profile and dramatic defections by North Koreans in recent years.
The defection by Ri — a former political counselor at the North’s Embassy in Cuba — was only made public last month. But it has already likely angered North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, because it could prompt his other diplomats to think about following RI in a blow to his grip on the country’s elites, observers say. Ri said the North Korean Embassy in Cuba has about 20 diplomats, making it the North’s third biggest mission abroad after China and Russia.
Ri,52, is the highest-ranking North Korean defecting to South Korea since Tae Yongho, a former minister of the North Korean Embassy in London, arrived in South Korea in 2016.
Ri’s defection came as animosities between the rival Koreas are at one of the highest points in years, with North Korea flying more than 3,000 trash-carrying balloons toward South Korea and continuing its provocative weapons tests in recent months. South Korea has responded by restarting frontline loudspeaker broadcasts of anti-Pyongyang messages and K-pop songs, a challenge to Kim’s efforts to limit access to foreign news for his 26 million people.
“The Kim Jong Un regime will likely be in a very bad temper if they see me speaking publicly in media interviews like this,” Ri said. “They could think that getting rid of a person like me would serve its interest. But I’m not worrying about it much because the South Korean government is placing a priority on my safety and protecting me.”
About nine months after his arrival in South Korea, Ri is under a South Korean government protection program. North Korea allegedly has a long history of assassinating or making attempts to kill high-level defectors, the estranged relatives of the Kim family living abroad and top South Korean officials.
Kim might personally remember Ri as he said he briefly met Kim many times with other officials in 2018 over preparations to receive top Cuban officials on two occasions. Sometimes Kim asked him questions.
In each meeting, Ri recalled that Kim smoked continuously and was short of breath like “an asthmatic patient” so he could hear the sound of Kim’s breathing. South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers Monday that North Korean officials are looking for new medicines abroad to treat Kim’s suspected obesity-related health problems such as high blood pressure and diabetes.
“At first meeting, I clearly shuddered though it wasn’t like I couldn’t answer. But from the second and third meetings, I didn’t shudder.”
Ri said he had long thought about defecting North Korea, which he called “a world of darkness” and “a republic of corruption.” He said his monthly pay was about $500 so he smuggled Cuban cigars to China via diplomatic pouches to make a living. He said North Korean diplomats in other countries have been involved in the smuggling of liquors, ivories, rhino horns, whiskeys and automobiles.
But he said what decisively triggered his defection was the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s rejection in early November of his hope to visit Mexico to treat his ruptured disc in his neck. He suspected his boss in Pyongyang was behind that decision because Ri earlier didn’t accept his request for bribe.
“That made me so mad,” Ri said. Without that incident, “I probably could have just repeatedly thought about defecting but failed to leave,” he said.
Ri’s defection came before Cuba established diplomatic ties with South Korea in February this year. As there was no embassy of South Korea in Cuba at that time, he said he couldn’t get as much support from its diplomats as other North Korean defectors managed to get elsewhere.
South Korean officials were eventually involved in Ri’s defection. But the government in Seoul and Ri refused to provide details about that because that would cause potential diplomatic troubles with concerned countries and help North Korea thwart future escape attempts by other North Koreans.
At the Havana airport, Ri said he and his family spent about an hour waiting for a plane. He said that one hour “was like a hell” as he feted so much about fellow North Korean embassy officials possibly detecting his departure and chasing him. He said he looked at his wrist-watch about 100 times before he and his family finally boarded the plane safely.
If caught, he said his family should have been sent to a prison camp, where he said they likely have to survive on eating insects. He said he thought it would be probably better to be killed than being imprisoned there.
Ri said he hasn’t determined what to do in South Korea yet. But he said the successful resettlements of some fellow North Korean defectors have encouraged him a lot. Tae, the former North Korean minister, was elected to a member of South Korean parliament before he was given a vice minister-level job last month. Ri said he read Tae’s memoir about ten times.
About 34,000 North Koreans have resettled in South Korea since the late 1990s to avoid poverty and political oppressions at home — most of them women from the North’s poorer northern provinces. Last year, about 10 North Koreans considered as elites arrived in South Korea, the highest such number in recent years, according to South Korea’s government.
“I can’t guarantee that my departure would lead to more defections by North Korean diplomats,” Ri said. “But I think my defection will surely affect them to have courage to defect.”
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