SEOUL, South Korea, Aug 4, (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 in November, he finished all necessary prep work alone. About a week later, he told his family to be ready to leave Cuba together in less than eight hours.
"My wife first told me not to make such a dreadful joke. So I showed her our plane tickets, and she was speechless,” Ri said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press. "I told my kid that there is no future or hope for North Korea.”
His family followed him to a Havana airport at dawn the 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 in July. It likely has angered North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, because it could prompt his other diplomats to follow suit 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 to defect to South Korea since Tae Yongho, a former minister of the North Korean Embassy in London, arrived in South Korea in 2016.
The news of Ri’s defection came as animosity between the rival Koreas soared to one of the highest points in years, with North Korea flying trash-carrying balloons toward South Korea and continuing its provocative weapons tests. South Korea responded by restarting front-line 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 mood if they see me speaking publicly in media interviews like this,” Ri said. "They might think it's in their interest to eliminate a person like me. But I'm not going to worry about that so much, because the South Korean government has made a priority of keeping me safe."
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.