Ryu Hyun-woo, North Korea’s acting ambassador to Kuwait, who defected to South Korea last year, recently gave a media interview in which he expressed happiness that he made the “right decision” by taking his Family to freedom, but feared for his family in North Korea.
“Let’s go find freedom with mom and dad.”
CNN reported on Feb. 1 that Ryu Hyun-woo defected to South Korea with his wife and daughter in September 2019, but their actions were not made public until last week. Ryu Hyun-woo said he and his wife spent about a month in Kuwait to plan how to defect.
Ryu Hyun-woo became acting ambassador to the North Korean embassy in Kuwait in 2017 after North Korean Ambassador to Kuwait Seo Chang-sik (So Chang-sik) was expelled from Kuwait due to U.N. sanctions.
If the defection had failed, Ryu Hyun-woo said, they would have been swiftly brought back to Pyongyang by North Korean agents and heavily punished, as defection is considered a serious disgrace by Kim Jong-un’s regime and would have been designated as the “ultimate traitor.
He said he and his wife finally decided to pretend to drive their daughter to school and then told her on the way that they planned to defect, “to go with mommy and daddy to find freedom. Ryu Hyun-woo recalled, “She was shocked and then said okay.”
So Yoo Hyun-woo’s family went to the Korean embassy in Kuwait and asked for asylum. They left for South Korea a few days later.
Fear of family implication at Home
There is a huge price to pay for the North Korean people to flee the authoritarian regime, and defectors must immediately cut ties with all their families at home. Ryu Hyun-woo said the North Korean regime sometimes keeps one of their children in the country as a hostage to ensure their Parents don’t betray them in order to stop diplomats from escaping.
Ryu Hyun-woo now worries about his three siblings and 83-year-old mother who are still in North Korea. “I just want to see them live a long Time,” he said, adding, “It breaks my heart to think that they are implicated because of me.”
He also worries about his parents-in-law who live in Pyongyang, where both Ryu Hyun-woo and his wife come from families of North Korea’s ruling elite. His father-in-law runs Kim Jong-un’s “Office 39,” the Kim family’s petty cash coffers.
“I like the freedom of the Internet here,” his daughter says.
North Korea has long used its overseas embassies as a cash cow for the Kim family. Kuwait is a particularly important source of income for Pyongyang, says Yoo Hyun-woo, because the country employs about 10,000 North Korean workers. These workers are treated as modern-day slaves, and almost all of their earnings flow back to the Kim family dynasty to pay for the Kim Jong Un regime’s priorities, such as its nuclear program.
Many North Korean workers were forced to leave the Gulf region in 2017 when the United Nations imposed sanctions on North Korea for its repeated missile and nuclear tests.
Looking back on the past 16 months, Yoo Hyun-woo said his only regret is the possible persecution of his family in North Korea. But he and his wife believe that bringing their daughter to South Korea was the right decision.
Ryu Hyun-woo told CNN he asked his daughter what she liked best about the place, and she replied, “I like being able to use the Internet freely.”
Ryu Hyun-woo is one of the top North Korean officials to defect in recent years, with Jo Song-gil, the North’s acting ambassador to Italy, defecting from South Korea in 2019 and Thae Yong-ho, a former deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom who was later elected to South Korea’s parliament, defecting in 2016.
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