SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea’s president on Thursday appointed a former North Korean diplomat as vice minister, the top government post for the thousands of North Koreans who have settled in South Korea.
Tae Yongho was minister at the North Korean embassy in London when he defected to South Korea in 2016. Tae is the highest-ranking North Korean to have settled in South Korea in recent years. He said he did so because he did not want his children to live a “miserable” life in North Korea and he was “despairing” over leader Kim Jong Un’s executions of civil servants and his nuclear ambitions.
North Korea called him “human scum” and accused him of embezzling government funds and committing other crimes.
President Yoon Suk Yeol appointed Tae as secretary-general of the Advisory Council for Peaceful Unification, which provides the president with policy advice on the peaceful reunification of Korea.
With the appointment, Tae becomes the first North Korean defector to hold a vice-ministerial post in South Korea, out of about 34,000 North Koreans who have settled in South Korea, according to the Unification Ministry in Seoul.
In 2020, Tae elected to the South Korean parliamentThere have been other North Korean defectors who have served as legislators in South Korea.
Yoon’s office said in a statement that Tae was the right person for the job because he could leverage his experience in North Korea and his work experience as a member of the South Korean parliament’s foreign policy and unification issues committee.
Most defectors left North Korea after a devastating famine in the mid-1990s. Upon arrival in South Korea, North Korean defectors are given citizenship, near-free apartments, resettlement money and other benefits. But coming from authoritarian, impoverished and nominally socialist North Korea, many experience various forms of discrimination and severe difficulties adjusting to new lives in capitalist, highly competitive South Korea, according to their interviews and research.
Yoon pledged on Sunday, the first “North Korean Defectors Day,” to provide more government support to improve the lives of North Korean defectors.
Most North Korean defectors are women from the North’s poorer northern regions along the country’s long, porous border with China. But in recent years, the number of North Korean elites fleeing to South Korea has steadily increased, according to the Unification Ministry.
On Tuesday, South Korea’s spy agency said that Ri Il Kyu, a political affairs adviser at the North Korean embassy in Cuba, defected to South Korea last November.
