For 11 years, [Jean-Baptiste Kim] was an official spokesperson for Kim Jong-Il, spreading propaganda and telling the international media it was a crime North Korea's dictator had not won the Nobel Peace Prize. In the 1990s, as the country endured a famine that killed an estimated one million of its citizens, North Korea was a five-star resort for Kim. He ate lavish meals, was attended by personal servants, slept in the same fancy hotels in which Kim Jong-Il slept.
That's all over. Kim now lives in Surrey, a sleepy suburb of London. Here he runs Liberty Telecoms. There are seven locks on the door. Kim rather expects to be shot by North Korean agents; in the meantime, he's got a mobile phone to sell you.
Kim defected last year, and his story is strange and instructive. He is one of the few people to have seen first-hand the results of Kim Jong-Il's policies -- such as the recent news that North Korea has closed its borders with South Korea.
"The life of ordinary people is horrible," he said. "Miserable. I can't ever forget what I've seen. People were wearing clothes that hadn't been washed in one year. It was October, and kids were walking around without shoes. There was a small man, about my age -- and he was no taller than my little daughter. He was a soldier, and he was carrying a Kalashnikov over one shoulder. The rifle was taller than him. And the reason? Because there's nothing to eat."
For a decade, though, Kim said, he witnessed none of this. In the Pyongyang circles he frequented, things didn't seem so bad. "They're high society. They eat good, they're tall, their bodies are healthy, they have nice apartments. And when I say nice, I don't mean like London or Paris -- but OK." Kim shrugged. "I was blind."
In October, 2006, Kim visited parts of the country he had never seen: "Ordinary places, with ordinary people. Small towns, small farms."
The malnutrition he witnessed was tough for him to cope with. Kim said he felt disgusted, and betrayed. "I was proud of my fatherland, of our army. When I met North Korean soldiers on the border with South Korea and shook their hands, I felt that they were not human hands. They were stronger than metal. They could kill me with them. Then I went to the small villages and what I saw I'll never forget."
At 18, Kim fled to France, where he was eventually recruited by a North Korean agent who played on his hatred of South Korean-style capitalism. "He became my father," Kim said. "Everything he told me, I believed. Everything he asked me to do, I did." The agent set Kim up in business, and used Kim's language skills and familiarity with attitudes in South Korea and the West to spread propaganda. The newfound wealth and acceptance was "blinding." He gave political interviews. Sure, North Korea was poor, he said. But the West had poverty too. And it was the West that was hurting North Korea most.
This opinion is frequently expressed among North Korean sympathizers. The United States is widely resented in Asia for continuing to maintain tens of thousands of troops in South Korea half a century after the Korean war.
Even Kim still believes that the North Korean people are right to resist Western influence. "Capitalism might be good for the United States, but not for everyone. For North Korea, communism is a good idea. It fits in North Korea. We can't all be the same."
His years inside the country have convinced him that any rapprochement between the West and North Korea will be useless as long as economic sanctions remain, and that exchange-- economic and cultural--is the only hope for the people under Kim Jong-Il's fist. Forcible regime change in Korea is even less realistic than it was in Iraq: North Korea has the world's fourth-largest army on permanent high alert.
"My generation [of North Koreans], they know their country isn't normal," Kim said. "But the decision-makers, they are still the war generation. They're still in the war, even though it's over now. I'm sorry to say, but they should die as quickly as they can."
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