Kim wants to rule all Korea, defector warns

The lifelong ambition of Kim Jong-il is to become dictator over a unified, communist Korea, a former top North Korean official said yesterday.

Hwang Jang Yop, the highest-ranking Pyongyang official to defect, also said in an interview with The Washington Times that North Korean ruler Kim Jong-il is a failed leader who has starved millions of his people but who is “brilliant” as a dictator.

Mr. Hwang, 81, said Mr. Kim’s “priority in life is to become the supreme ruler of the unified Chosun, or, as you call it, Korea.”

Speaking through an interpreter, he said he does not believe Mr. Kim would initiate a war against South Korea unless he was certain the communist forces would prevail, but that he would use nuclear weapons in a conflict.

Mr. Hwang said Mr. Kim should be judged by “the fruits of his labor, what he has done.”

“Before Kim Jong-il came to power, there was his father, Kim Il-sung. No one starved to death under Kim Il-sung. However, after Kim Jong-il came to power, millions of people starved to death. The economy has been destroyed, and the whole government and the country became one big prison. As a politician, he is a failure.”

The defector, also a former tutor and mentor to Mr. Kim, met with senior Bush administration and congressional officials last week. One official said Mr. Hwang provided important information in closed-door meetings on Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

Mr. Hwang was a close aide to Mr. Kim’s father, dictator Kim Il-sung, and is one of the few people outside North Korea who has intimate knowledge of the reclusive regime. He was the chief ghostwriter for Kim Il-sung and gave shape to the regime’s philosophy of “juche,” or self-reliance. He also helped promote Kim Jong-il’s cult of personality and was a senior official in the Korean Worker’s Party.

He broke with the younger Mr. Kim in February 1997 during a visit to China and later escaped to South Korea, where he heads an organization of former North Koreans that seeks to topple the dictatorship in Pyongyang and replace it with a democracy.

One U.S. State Department official compared the defection at the time to “Lenin defecting from the Soviet Union.”

Asked by The Times whether Mr. Kim could be trusted to abide by nuclear accords, Mr. Hwang said: “That’s a good question. People can change, and conditions can force a person to follow a certain path.

“However, if history is an indication, when the Geneva framework was entered into, North Korea, especially Kim Jong-il, failed to abide by the terms of the agreement. And I think there’s a certain possibility that Kim Jong-il would follow the same path again.”

Mr. Hwang said the North Korean regime’s failures led it to seek nuclear weapons to maintain its grip on power and that Mr. Kim would be willing to use the weapons against South Korea in a conflict.

“I would think that by having these warheads, it would be possible to maintain the status quo of the dictatorial regime of North Korea,” Mr. Hwang said.

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