“Deputy Ambassador Thae has said that his reasons for defection are that he is sick and exhausted of the Kim Jong Un regime, that he longs for South Korea’s liberal democracy, and that he is concerned about his children and the future”, announced Jeong Joon-Hee.
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Thae Yong-ho, a top North Korean envy who acted as propagandist and advocate for Pyongyang in London mission, has been confirmed to have safely arrived in South Korea with his family.
Impoverished North Korea and prosperous South Korea are technically still at war after their 1950-53 conflict ended in an armis-tice, not a peace treaty. The most heavily fortified in the world is the border between Korea and the two countries frequently exchange gunfire in the frontier.
Meanwhile, South Korean experts believe the manoeuvres could aggravate tension with North Korea at a time of deteriorating bilateral relations. While unusual, the defection to South Korea by a descendant of anti-Japanese partisan fighters is not the first, despite some reports to the contrary. Calls to Thae’s mobile phone were redirected to a voicemail inbox. North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and Seoul been working hard to apply more global pressure on the North.
On Saturday, North Korea broke its official silence over the defection, calling Thae a criminal and condemning Seoul for spreading what it called false rumors about the North. Pyongyang also lambasted Britain for not handing over the supposed criminal to the regime despite its strong protests.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry announced the defection on Wednesday. The new stream of elite defections may undermine the very foundations of the Kim regime, thereby compelling Pyongyang to raise tensions on the Korean peninsula for the objective of forging internal unity while also accelerating improvements in its nuclear capability.
“There’s been those kind of things that have happened in the past for very high level defectors, assassination attempts and death threats. there will be protection from the South Korean authorities around this person, especially [in] the short term”, Park said. The number of soldiers and civilian army workers in the region has risen to more than 100,000, from 70,000, four years ago. “In this regard, Thae’s defection represents the flight of some of the North’s best”, Mr Cha said.
Kum-hyok was born when Thae was stationed in Denmark and grew up in Sweden and the U.K. He attended a state school near the unglamorous embassy in the western suburb of Ealing, where the boy excelled academically.
For the last two years, Choi has also been a regular participant on a weekly YouTube video program devoted to defector-related issues. Between 2006 and 2011, approximately 2,500 North Koreans entered the South per year on average, with a record high of 2,914 in 2007. To add insult to injury, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2270 in the wake of North Korea’s fourth nuclear test in January, which imposed new sanctions on the isolated regime.
“I don’t blame reporters”, Thae said during a speech at a left-wing London bookshop in late 2014. “It’s not the exercises, but the state of diplomacy in the weeks prior that will tell them whether North Korea will do something big in retaliation”.
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“The more horrifying, the more shocking stories they create, the more they will be viewed by the British public”.
