Top N. Korean Official Reportedly Defects

Hwang Jang Yop, one of North Korea’s most senior officials, with close political and family connections to the Pyongyang regime, strode into the South Korean Consulate here Wednesday and reportedly demanded political asylum.

The apparent defection of Hwang, 72, one of the main architects of the stridently nationalistic North Korean political ideology and a former president of North Korea’s leading university, was reported by South Korean envoys in Beijing and created a prickly diplomatic dilemma for the Chinese.

Although the North claimed that he had been kidnapped, South Korean Embassy spokesman Chang Moon Ik said: “This morning Hwang Jang Yop and his male secretary visited our consular section and said they wanted to defect to [South] Korea. We are protecting them in our embassy compound.”

Hwang’s secretary was identified as Kim Duk Hong, 59, a longtime aide who heads a North Korean trading firm in Beijing.

Late Wednesday night, dozens of armed Chinese security police ringed the South Korean Consulate in the San Li Tun enclave where Hwang is believed to be under diplomatic protection. Reporters were prevented from approaching the building in the quiet, tree-lined neighborhood on the eastern edge of the city. Inside the two-story consulate building, lights blazed in most of the offices. South Korean diplomats occasionally left the building to speak with plainclothes Chinese security officials.

Hwang, married to a niece of the late North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung--whose son Kim Jong Il now runs North Korea--would be the most senior North Korean leader to defect to the South, if he gets there.

South Korea, which has developed important economic stakes in China since it was officially recognized by the Beijing regime in 1992, is expected to ask that Hwang be allowed to travel to Seoul, where he could provide invaluable intelligence on the inner workings of the Pyongyang regime and ruling family. But North Korea, China’s closest Communist ally, has a repatriation agreement with the Beijing government that covers political defectors.

“The whole world will be watching to see what China does,” a Western diplomat said. “The Chinese are in a real bind.”

Although the China-North Korea alliance was once routinely described by Chinese leaders as so close it was like “lips and teeth,” the relationship has deteriorated in recent years following Beijing’s diplomatic recognition of South Korea and the Chinese government’s concern over North Korea’s secret development of a nuclear weapons program.

“I cannot disclose an initial reaction from Beijing authorities about the case because it is a highly sensitive matter,” Chung Chung Wook, South Korea’s ambassador to China, told reporters.

Officials at the North Korean Embassy here refused comment on the reported defection. But North Korea quickly denied the report through its official news agency, which said it was “inconceivable and impossible” that Hwang would seek asylum.

“If it is true that Hwang Jang Yop is in the South Korean ‘embassy’ in Beijing, it is obvious that he has been kidnapped by the enemy. We are seeking information from the Chinese side through relevant channels,” the Korean Central News Agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying. “If it is brought to light that the South Korean authorities kidnapped him and describe him as seeking ‘asylum,’ we will regard it as a serious incident without precedent and take due countermeasures. We expect that the Chinese side will take appropriate measures in this regard.”

A spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined immediate comment.

In Seoul, the Yonhap news agency quoted government sources as saying that a high-level South Korean diplomatic delegation would be sent to Beijing to negotiate Hwang’s hand-over. As an indicator of the gravity with which Seoul regards this situation, South Korea’s foreign minister canceled his travel plans, and the Cabinet met in emergency session to discuss Hwang’s case.

This incident occurred only four days before North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s 55th birthday celebration, which has been declared in the North Korean government press as the country’s “greatest national holiday.”

It also comes amid reports from International Red Cross officials of severe hardships inside North Korean territory and reported increases in the number of economic and political refugees seeking asylum in the South.

Defections from North Korea began to increase in 1993 when lumberjacks working in logging camps near Siberia sought asylum in South Korean diplomatic missions in Russia; 1,000 defectors are believed to be hiding in the ethnic Korean area of northeast China.

In another highly publicized defection last year, a former wife of Kim Jong Il was reported to have sought asylum in the West after escaping from her North Korean bodyguards in Geneva. In December, a family of 17 North Koreans crossed the shallow Tumen River into China and eventually made their way to freedom in Hong Kong. Other defections have included a diplomat, his wife and a supposed secret agent posing as a taekwondo instructor in the African nation of Zambia.

But none of the previous incidents, if the claims of the South Korean diplomats prove true about this case, have hit as close to the center of North Korean power as that of Hwang. “The North Korean leadership is receiving a monumental shock from this defection,” said Kasumi Sato, an expert with the Modern Korea Institute in Tokyo. “Hwang is different from previous defectors. What in the world is North Korea going to do now?”

Hwang, who studied in Tokyo and Moscow, is considered one of the premier authorities on the North Korean philosophy of “self-reliance” known as juche. A high-ranking official in Seoul observed: “Since Hwang is the very person who established juche, his defection means a denial of North Korea’s most basic ideology. His defection also means that unrest in North Korean society is reaching the inner circles.”

At one time ranked as the 13th most powerful man in the North Korean hierarchy, Hwang served as chairman of the North Korean Supreme People’s Assembly and as president of the elite Kim Il Sung University. At the university he reportedly personally tutored Kim Jong Il in Marxism-Leninism. As one of the country’s leading theoreticians, Hwang was one of the few North Korean officials allowed to travel widely outside his country. Previous travels included trips to Romania, Yugoslavia and Japan.

He was in transit from a recent trip to Japan when the reported defection took place. One matter still unclear about the defection was why he chose to approach South Korean diplomats in Beijing, where the Chinese government was unlikely to welcome the idea, rather than in Tokyo, where the reception would probably be more favorable. “Perhaps he was guarded too heavily in Tokyo,” speculated one Western diplomat in Beijing.

Times staff writer Teresa Watanabe in Tokyo contributed to this report.