SEOUL, Korea, Republic Of — The son of the highest-profile South Korean ever to defect to North Korea has arrived in the North to permanently resettle, Pyongyang’s state media said. If confirmed, it would be an unusual case of a South Korean defecting to the impoverished, authoritarian North.
The state-run Uriminzokkiri website reported that Choe In-guk arrived in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, on Saturday to dedicate his life to Korean unification at the guidance of leader Kim Jong Un. The website published photos and footage showing a bespectacled Choe in a beret reading his arrival statement at Pyongyang’s international airport.
Choe said he’s over 70 years old and that he decided to live in North Korea for the rest of his life because it was his parents’ “dying wishes” for him to “follow” North Korea and work for its unification with South Korea, according to a written statement published on the website.
Choe is the son of former South Korean Foreign Minister Choe Dok-shin, who defected to the North in 1986 with his wife after political disputes with then-South Korean President Park Chung-hee. He died in 1989.
Observers say North Korea accepted Choe In-guk because it can use him as a propaganda tool to tell its citizens its system is superior to the South’s. Kim is struggling to revive his country’s moribund economy and improve public livelihoods, as the United States hasn’t agreed on major sanctions relief until he takes significant steps toward nuclear disarmament.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry said Choe In-guk was in North Korea without special permission from the Seoul government to visit the North. Ministry spokesman Lee Sang-min told reporters Monday that authorities were trying to find out details about Choe’s travel to North Korea.
The two Koreas, split along the world’s most heavily fortified border for about 70 years, bar their citizens from visiting each other’s territory and exchanging phone calls, letters or emails without special permissions. Since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, more than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to South Korea to avoid political repression and economic poverty.
South Koreans have occasionally defected to North Korea in the past, but it’s become a rarity in recent years — especially since the North suffered a crippling famine in the mid-1990s that was estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people.
A small number of South Koreans suffering economic hardship at home went to North Korea to live in past years, but North Korea is known to have repatriated such people. The Unification Ministry said North Korea returned two South Koreans who entered North Korea last year, but it didn’t elaborate.
Before his death, the senior Choe held high-level posts in North Korea such as vice chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, an agency dealing with relations with South Korea, and head of the Chondoist Chongu Party, a political group affiliated with a Korean native religion called “Chondo.”
His wife, Ryu Mi Yong, had also taken up a slew of high-profile jobs, including being a member of the presidium of the North’s rubber-stamp parliament and chairwoman of the Central Committee of the Chondoist Chongu Party. When she died at the age of 95 in 2016, a public funeral was organized and her body was buried along with her husband’s at Pyongyang’s Patriotic Martyrs Cemetery.
According to South Korea’s Unification Ministry, Choe In-guk was allowed to make 12 authorized trips to North Korea since 2001 for events like visiting his parents’ cemetery and attending a death anniversary for his mother.
It wasn’t immediately known how he went to North Korea, but South Korean media speculated he flew from Beijing with a North Korean government-issued visa. Before his latest trip to North Korea, Choe was a member of a “Chondo” church in South Korea and was engaged in inter-Korean engagement movements, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported, citing an unidentified church official.