| Submit your comments on this article |
| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Nork Defector Describes Inner Workings of Isolated Regime |
| 2009-07-09 |
| Great read about an English-speaking defector. Perhaps he's only telling us what we want to hear, but ...As they crossed the airport in Singapore that day in 2003, heading for the plane that would take them to Seoul -- and a new life of freedom -- North Korean defector Kim Kwang Jin and his wife and son all feared for their lives. "My wife was very frightened," recalled Kim, a high-ranking banker for the North Korean regime who was stationed in Singapore at the time. "She told me afterwards that...every step through the airport was like walk[ing] to [her] slaughtering....It was not easy to make such a decision." Now a visiting fellow with the Washington, D.C.-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Kim is described by veteran analysts as the first English-proficient defector ever to escape the Hermit Kingdom. Trim and sharply dressed, his bushy head of hair dyed jet black, the 42-year-old Kim, once an English professor at a computer college in Pyongyang, speaks polite and fluent English, albeit in a halting style and with a heavy accent. An interview with FOX News in late June marked Kim's first with an American TV news channel. Kim recounted his extraordinary experiences working for the Northeast Asia Bank and Korea National Insurance Corporation, where he handled accounts worth hundreds of million of dollars. |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #1 Re NK media: radios are pre-set to receive only national government communication. Thus, the people are unaware that NK's elite are the biggest importers of French Cognac. Buying Kim's non-belligerence in non-productive. We should effect complete disassociation. |
| Posted by: Black Bart Phaviting8990 2009-07-09 13:52 |