Kim Jong Un needs Trump again, elite defector tells BBC

Donald Trump returning to the White Home can be “a once-in-a-thousand-year alternative” for North Korea, in accordance with a person in a singular place to know.

Ri Il Kyu is the highest-profile defector to flee North Korea since 2016 and has been head to head with Kim Jong Un on seven separate events.

The previous diplomat, who was working in Cuba when he fled along with his household to South Korea final November, admits to “shivering with nerves” the primary time he met Kim Jong Un.

However throughout every assembly, he discovered the chief to be “smiling and in a superb temper”.

“He praised individuals typically and laughed. He looks like an extraordinary particular person,” Mr Ri says. However he’s in little doubt Mr Kim would do something to ensure his survival, even if it meant killing all 25 million of his individuals: “He may have been an exquisite particular person and father, however turning him right into a god has made him a monstrous being.”

In an hours-long interview with the BBC, Mr Ri gives a uncommon understanding of what the world’s most secretive and repressive states is hoping to realize.

He mentioned that North Korea nonetheless views Mr Trump as somebody it may negotiate with over its nuclear weapons programme, regardless of talks between him and Kim Jong Un breaking down in 2019.

Mr Trump has beforehand hailed the connection with Kim as a key achievement of his presidency. He famously mentioned the 2 “fell in love” exchanging letters. Simply final month, he instructed a rally Mr Kim wish to see him again in workplace: “I believe he misses me, if you wish to know the reality.”

North Korea is hoping it may use this shut private relationship to its benefit, mentioned Mr Ri, contradicting an official assertion from Pyongyang final month that it “didn’t care” who turned president.

The nuclear state won’t ever eliminate its weapons, Mr Ri mentioned, and would most likely search a deal to freeze its nuclear programme in return for the US lifting sanctions.

However he mentioned Pyongyang wouldn’t negotiate in good religion. Agreeing to freeze its nuclear programme “can be a ploy, 100% deception”, he mentioned, including that this was subsequently a “harmful method” that will “solely result in the strengthening of North Korea”.

Eight months after his defection, Ri Il Kyu is now residing along with his household within the South Korean capital, Seoul. Accompanied by a police bodyguard and two intelligence brokers, he explains his resolution to desert his authorities.

After years of being floor down by the corruption, bribery and lack of freedom he confronted, Mr Ri says he was lastly tipped over the sting when his request to journey to Mexico to get an operation on a slipped disc in his neck was denied. “I lived the lifetime of the highest 1% in North Korea, however that’s nonetheless worse than a middle-class household within the South.”

As a diplomat in Cuba, Mr Ri made simply $500 (£294) a month and so would promote Cuban cigars illegally in China to make sufficient to assist his household.

When he first instructed his spouse about his need to defect, she was so disturbed she ended up in hospital with coronary heart issues. After that, he saved his plans secret, solely sharing them together with her and his baby six hours earlier than their airplane was as a result of depart.

He describes it as a “life-or-death gamble”. Common North Koreans who’re caught defecting would usually be tortured for a number of months, then launched, he says. “However for elites like us, there are solely two outcomes – life in a political jail camp or being executed by a firing squad.”

“The worry and terror have been overwhelming. I may settle for my very own loss of life, however I couldn’t bear the considered my household being dragged to a gulag,” he says. Though Mr Ri had by no means believed in God, as he waited nervously on the airport gate in the course of the night time, he started to wish.

The final recognized high-profile defection to the South was that of Tae Yong-ho in 2016. A former deputy ambassador to the UK, he was not too long ago named the brand new chief of South Korea’s presidential advisory council on unification.

Turning to North Korea’s current nearer ties with Russia, Mr Ri says the Ukraine conflict had been a stroke of luck for Pyongyang. The US and South Korea estimate the North has bought Moscow tens of millions of rounds of ammunition to assist its invasion, in return for meals, gas and probably even navy know-how.

Mr Ri says the primary good thing about this deal for Pyongyang was the flexibility to proceed growing its nuclear weapons.

With the deal, Russia had created a “loophole” within the stringent worldwide sanctions on North Korea, he says, which had allowed it “to freely develop its nuclear weapons and missiles and strengthen its defence, whereas bypassing the necessity to enchantment to the US for sanctions aid”.

However Mr Ri says that Kim Jong Un understands this relationship is momentary and that after the conflict, Russia is prone to sever relations. For that reason, Mr Kim has not given up on the US, Mr Ri says.

“North Korea understands that the one path to its survival, the one method to remove the specter of invasion and develop its financial system, is to normalise relations with america.”

Whereas Russia might need given North Korea a brief respite from its financial ache, Mr Ri says the entire closure of North Korea’s borders throughout the pandemic had “severely devastated the nation’s financial system and folks’s lives”.

When the borders reopened in 2023 and diplomats have been getting ready to return, Mr Ri says households again dwelling had requested them to “deliver something and all the things you have got, even your used toothbrushes, as a result of there’s nothing left in North Korea”.

The North Korean chief calls for complete loyalty from his residents and the mere whiff of dissent may end up in imprisonment. However Mr Ri says years of hardship had eroded individuals’s loyalty, as no-one now anticipated to obtain something from their “Supreme Chief” Kim Jong Un.

“There isn’t any real loyalty to the regime or to Kim Jong Un anymore, it’s a pressured loyalty, the place one have to be loyal or face loss of life,” he says.

Current change has largely been pushed by an inflow of South Korean movies, dramas and music, which have been smuggled into the North and are unlawful to look at and hearken to.

“Folks don’t watch South Korean content material as a result of they’ve capitalist beliefs, they’re merely attempting to cross the time of their monotonous and bleak lives,” Mr Ri says, however then they start to ask, “Why do these within the South stay the lifetime of a first-world nation whereas we’re impoverished?”

However Mr Ri says that though South Korean content material was altering North Korea, it might not result in its collapse, due to the methods of management in place. “Kim Jong Un could be very conscious that loyalty is waning, that persons are evolving, and that’s why he’s intensifying his reign of terror,” he says.

The federal government has launched legal guidelines to harshly punish those that eat and distribute South Korean content material. The BBC spoke to at least one defector final 12 months who mentioned he had witnessed somebody be executed after sharing South Korean music and TV reveals.

North Korea’s resolution, on the finish of final 12 months, to desert a decades-old coverage of finally reunifying with the South, was an additional try and isolate individuals from the South, Mr Ri says.

He described this as Kim Jong Un’s “most evil act”, as a result of all North Koreans dream of reunification. He says that whereas North Korea’s previous leaders had “stolen individuals’s freedom, cash and human rights, Kim Jong Un has robbed what was left of them: hope”.

Exterior North Korea, a lot consideration is paid to Kim Jong Un’s well being, with some believing that his untimely loss of life may set off the collapse of the regime. Earlier this week, South Korea’s intelligence company estimated that Mr Kim weighed 140kg, placing him liable to heart problems.

However Mr Ri believes the system of surveillance and management is now too properly established for Kim’s loss of life to threaten the dictatorship. “One other evil chief will merely take his place,” he says.

It has been broadly speculated that Mr Kim is grooming his younger daughter, regarded as referred to as Ju Ae, to be his successor, however Mr Ri dismisses the notion.

Ju Ae, he says, lacked the legitimacy and recognition to turn out to be the chief of North Korea, particularly because the sacred Paektu bloodline, which the Kims use to justify their rule, is believed to run solely by way of the boys of the household.

At first, individuals have been fascinated by Ju Ae, Mr Ri says, however not any extra. They questioned why she was attending missile checks slightly than going to highschool, and sporting luxurious, designer garments as an alternative of her college uniform, like different youngsters.

Reasonably than ready for Mr Kim to turn out to be in poor health or die, Mr Ri says the worldwide group needed to come collectively, together with North Korea’s allies China and Russia, to “persistently persuade it to vary”.

“That is the one factor that may deliver in regards to the finish of the North Korean dictatorship,” he provides.

Mr Ri is hoping that his defection conjures up his friends, to not defect themselves, however to push for small modifications from the within. He doesn’t have lofty ambitions, that North Koreans will be capable of vote or journey, merely that they’ll select what jobs to work, have sufficient meals to eat and be capable of share their opinions freely amongst associates.

For now, although, his precedence helps his household settle into their new life in South Korea and for his baby to assimilate into society.

On the finish of our interview, he posed a situation. “Think about I give you a enterprise and inform you, if we succeed we win huge, but when we fail it means loss of life.

“You wouldn’t agree, would you? Effectively that’s the selection I pressured upon my household, and so they silently agreed and adopted me,” he says.

“That is now a debt I need to repay for the remainder of my life.”