N. Korean Defector Arrives in South

The highest-ranking official ever to flee North Korea arrived in South Korea today, declaring he had defected because he had lost “all hope” in a communist regime unable to feed its hungry people.

Hwang Jang Yop and an aide flew in from the Philippines, where they were taken after defecting during a stopover in Beijing on Feb. 12. Their months-long detour was intended to spare China diplomatic embarrassment over the incident.

Hwang said he fled to the South to try to prevent North Korea from launching a war. “I had no choice but to defect. Hand in hand with South Korean people, I wanted to block North Korean attempts to launch a war,” he said in a prepared statement.

“North Korea seems to think there is no option but to use the forces they have accumulated,” Hwang said.

“The North Korean economy is almost paralyzed. People are suffering from starvation and the government has no choice but to beg from international agencies,” he said.

Philippine officials who accompanied Hwang handed over the defectors to South Korean authorities on arrival in Seoul, South Korean officials said. Hwang and his aide, Kim Duk Hong, were greeted by hometown friends living in South Korea and other defectors.

South Korean officials said intelligence agents will take Hwang and Kim, 59, head of a North Korean trade firm, away for medical checks and extensive debriefing.

Hwang, 72, a chief architect of the North’s isolationist policy of “juche,” or self-reliance, once tutored North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

As a former official of North Korea’s ruling body, the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party, he could provide much new information for a world curious about secretive North Korea.

Seoul officials said Hwang would probably speak at a news conference in several weeks.

Meanwhile, for the second straight day, North Korea failed Saturday to resume scheduled talks with the United States and South Korea on a Korean peninsula peace proposal.

In an effort to keep their initiative from collapsing, the Americans and South Koreans persuaded the North Koreans to hold lower-level contacts aimed at getting the crucial senior-level dialogue back on track. But that three-hour effort was unsuccessful.

A U.S.-South Korean proposal for four-way peace talks seeks to close the books on the 1950-53 Korean War by replacing the fraying armistice with a peace treaty. The talks would also include China.