A soldier who dramatically fled North Korea by crossing the heavily armed Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) into South Korea last year told Japanese media that he believes about 80 percent of young North Koreans are “indifferent” towards the regime and have “no loyalty” to Kim Jong-un, English-language reports revealed on Monday.
The man, identified as 25-year-old Oh Jeong-seon, made international headlines last year after running into South Korea near the border village of Panmunjom, triggering gunfire from North into South that technically violated the armistice agreement between the two countries. The incident was caught on video and Asian media followed his recovery closely, reporting that Oh was found to suffer from intestinal parasites in addition to gunshot wounds.
The Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun first identified Oh last week, publishing his first-ever interview. Media outlets like Agence France-Presse (AFP) first published English translations of the interview on Monday.
In the Sankei interview, Oh explains that he was in hospital care between November 2017, when he first crossed the border, into February of this year, recovering from gunshot wounds in the abdomen and arms. He explained that he decided to defect because he had gotten drunk following a disagreement with friends and wandered to the border. By the time he realized he had crossed, soldiers were shooting at him, and “I feared I could be executed if I went back so I crossed the border.”
“I crossed over because there was a possibility of being executed,” he explained, “but I do not regret it.”
Oh noted that he was the son of a Major General in the North Korean military, which made him significantly more privileged than most of the population of the country. Sankei asserts that Japanese intelligence officials confirmed his identity before the newspaper published the interview. Even as a soldier in a respected family, Oh said that he could afford about one cigarette a month. “For my father, it was two [cigarettes],” he noted.
He went on to explain that he did not believe any political fervor for the Kim family existed in North Korea anymore.
“Inside the North, people, and especially the younger generation, are indifferent to each other, politics, and their leaders, and there is no sense of loyalty,” he told the newspaper. “Probably 80 percent of my generation is indifferent and has no loyalty.”
He said he, too, was “indifferent” to the Kim regime, even as a soldier sworn to protect it.
Oh appeared from the neck down in a video published by the Japanese newspaper, where AFP notes he can be heard possessing a “slight” North Korean accent.
Sankei noted that a recent poll conducted in South Korea of North Korean defectors found that about half of them fled the country because they were starving and could not secure one meal a day, but only 7.6 percent said they fled because they disliked the Kim family.
Oh’s defection was not the last in 2017. Following his escape, a second soldier similarly crossed the DMZ in December. At the time, Reuters noted that the number of North Koreans fleeing the country in 2017 was triple that of the year before. Refugee defections at the DMZ are far less common than on the border with China, which is less fortified. The risk to crossing into China is that the fellow communist government there returns refugees to North Korea, where they typically face execution or a life sentence at a labor camp, along with multiple generations of their families whether they were aware of their relative’s plans to escape or not.
While Kim Jong-un has apparently decelerated his regime’s race towards a nuclear weapon in the past year, signs continue to surface from within the country that his military is deeply dissatisfied with his actions. On Monday, the independent outlet Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported that a retired North Korean general was arrested for expressing concern aloud that Kim “did not care about the lives of the people.”
An unidentified source told RFA that the man “told his close friend who works on the accounting team at the State Security Department that [Kim’s] inspection tours were just public relations stunts meant to amplify [the leader’s own] achievements.” His friend reportedly him to police, who promptly arrested him.
Another senior military official reportedly disappeared this month after being caught reading RFA, which publishes extremely critical reports of the communist Kim regime. The entire military command under the unnamed individual suffered disciplinary measures for his exposure to the media outlet.
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