N. Korean Defector Garners Safe Passage

Five weeks after he walked into the South Korean Consulate here seeking political asylum, a top-ranking North Korean defector was under heavy security Tuesday in the Philippines, his first stop on a journey that is expected to end eventually in Seoul.

Philippine officials confirmed that Hwang Jang Yop, 72, author of the isolationist code of self-reliance--or juche--practiced in North Korea, landed in a charter aircraft at the former U.S. Clark Air Force Base near Manila. Military officials told Reuters news agency that Hwang was then taken by helicopter to Baguio, a mountain retreat 125 miles northwest of Manila.

The cloak-and-dagger exit by the most senior official to defect from North Korea ended a diplomatic paralysis that caught the Chinese government between its longtime Communist ally, North Korea, and its important new economic partner, South Korea. And the breakthrough came only a week before Vice President Al Gore is scheduled to visit Beijing.

In the end, China’s government, which does not recognize the right of asylum in diplomatic missions, sided with the South Koreans, accepting an offer from Philippine authorities to temporarily harbor Hwang.

In a terse statement broadcast on national television Tuesday night, the Beijing government announced that “according to Hwang’s own will and considering the positions taken by the parties concerned, China has sent Hwang out of China’s territory for a third country, in accordance with international law and practice.”

Diplomats said that during the protracted negotiations, North Korean agents made at least two attempts to penetrate elaborate security defenses set up by Chinese police around the two-story South Korean Consulate.

Hwang, once the personal tutor of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, is expected to live out the rest of his days as a marked man in the violent world of secret police and assassinations that characterizes relations between North and South Korea.

Just three days after Hwang sought asylum here, another North Korean defector was shot to death near Seoul. The victim, a nephew of Kim Jong Il’s former wife, was shot down with a Czech-made pistol outside a friend’s apartment.

According to South Korean press reports, the Seoul government made several pledges to the Chinese government before Hwang’s release from the Beijing diplomatic compound was permitted.

The defection of Hwang, a member of North Korea’s highest decision-making body, the Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party, represents a major diplomatic coup. But the South Koreans agreed not to use Hwang or Kim Duk Hong, 59, a longtime aide who defected with him, for “political purposes,” the South Korean press accounts said.

In addition, China apparently asked that Hwang remain in the Philippines at least a month before traveling to South Korea, a buffer intended to soften the shock to the North.