South Korea celebrated its inaugural Defectors’ Day on 14 July, in honour of the 34,000 North Koreans who have made their home there. Within hours, news broke that one of Pyongyang’s senior diplomats had joined them. Ri Il-kyu, who had been a political counsellor in Cuba, is the highest-level defector since 2016, when North Korea’s deputy ambassador to Britain vanished from London and surfaced in Seoul. Mr Ri said that he was motivated by disillusionment with the regime, though frustrated ambition seems to have contributed.
Such insiders can bring valuable insight into political life and events in Pyongyang. Any such information is especially welcome when the North has deliberately increased its isolation and opacity, and when there are growing concerns about its burgeoning arms-for-oil relationship with Russia and advances in its weapons programme. George Robertson, head of the new Labour government’s defence review, warned last Tuesday that a “deadly quartet” of nations – China, Russia, Iran and North Korea – are acting together against the west.
The North, previously identified alongside Iran and Iraq in George W Bush’s “axis of evil”, might see that as something of a promotion. Long an expert in using nuclear blackmail as a diplomatic tool, North Korea has now seized on the opportunities afforded by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Moscow has used its UN security council veto to prevent the panel of experts monitoring Pyongyang’s sanctions violations from continuing their work – shutting off another avenue for scrutiny.
Mr Ri told a South Korean newspaper that Ri Yong-ho, the foreign minister who vanished from the spotlight two years ago, was sent to a prison camp, while another senior diplomat dealing with the US, Han Song-ryol, was executed for spying. Life in the elite is no guarantee of safety, and leaving it can be still more dangerous. Kim Jong-un’s own brother was killed in public, at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, in a plot arranged by Pyongyang’s agents (though North Korea denied responsibility). Collective punishment ensures that many stay in line for fear of what might happen to their families.
“Every North Korean thinks at least once about living in South Korea,” Mr Ri said. Belief in the system broke down long ago. The humanitarian crisis has deepened. But few outside the elite have the opportunity to flee. The number of defectors overall has plummeted in recent years, from 2,700 a decade ago to just 196 last year, thanks to crackdowns by the Chinese authorities in border areas and then – as Covid struck – the closing of borders, building of fences and intensification of domestic controls by the North Korean regime. This has also drastically reduced knowledge of what is happening in the country.
In a powerful report from Human Rights Watch this spring, one defector explained that a relative was scared to leave because of “a general sense of terror much stronger than a bullet or a wire fence”. Those who are caught face prison camps where beatings, sexual violence and torture are said to be rife, part of an extensive system of forced labour detailed in a new report by the UN human rights agency. High or low, North Koreans face repression and brutality. But while so many struggle to survive, those at the top enjoy material comfort – and if that’s not enough to make them stay, they have a better chance of getting out.
