ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 13, 1997 TAG: 9702130044
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: THE WASHINGTON POST
North Korea's regime suffered the highest-level defection in its history Wednesday when its top theoretician, a close adviser to leader Kim Jong Il, sought asylum at the South Korean Embassy in Beijing.
Hwang Jang Yop, key architect of North Korea's guiding philosophy of juche, or self-reliance, defected on his way home from a two-week tour of Japan during which he gave speeches and interviews promoting North Korean ideology. Author of many basic texts in North Korea, Hwang, 72, is also married to a niece of the late, longtime leader Kim Il Sung.
``I'm astonished; it's like Marx defecting from the former Soviet Union,'' said Hajime Izumi, a leading North Korean specialist at the University of Shizuoka in Japan.
``It's like Thomas Jefferson defected from America,'' said a foreign diplomat in Beijing.
North Korean spokesmen at first denied the defection, then charged that Hwang had been kidnapped.
``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.
A South Korean Embassy spokesman in Beijing said Hwang and one of his aides walked into the embassy just after 10 a.m. Wednesday.
Wednesday night, he was still in one of the embassy buildings, surrounded by Chinese security police and at the center of sensitive diplomatic negotiations regarding his passage to Seoul, the South Korean capital. China has long sought to avoid choosing sides in the Korean dispute, simultaneously seeking to maintain historic links to North Korea while forging closer ties to South Korea and wooing its investment.
South Korea responded cautiously to the defection, taking care not to antagonize either Pyongyang or its allies in Beijing unnecessarily.
Hwang's defection is seen as further evidence of instability in North Korea, which is suffering food shortages that some international relief agencies say threaten the country with famine this summer. Red Cross officials in Beijing said North Korea slashed grain-consumption allowances by more than half, from 8.4 ounces a day to 3.4, four weeks ago.
``It's too much to die from and too little to live off of,'' one official said. Warehouse stockpiles are expected to be depleted by July.
With reports of hunger increasing, defections have risen among soldiers, officials and others. Many have crossed the porous border into China's Liaoning Province, drawing support from ethnic Koreans who live on the Chinese side despite China's sometimes harsh tactics in discouraging refugees.
But there has never been a defection by anyone of the stature of Hwang, former president of Kim Il Sung University and one of only 11 members of the powerful Secretariat of the Workers' Party of Korea. He has been elected chairman of the Supreme People's Assembly three times.
Hwang attended college in Japan, then went to Moscow University in 1948 to study communist ideology and philosophy. He taught philosophy at Kim Il Sung University, then became chief of the North Korean Workers' Party propaganda and agitation department in 1962. He has been a member of the party's central committee since 1970.
Hwang left his wife, two sons and two daughters behind in Pyongyang.
If Hwang ends up in Seoul and chooses to talk, he could offer South Korean and U.S. intelligence officials rare insight into the true situation inside the sealed and isolated nation, which some believe is on the brink of a potentially disastrous collapse. And it would be an unprecedented opportunity to learn about Kim Jong Il and the small circle of underlings who control one of the world's largest military forces.
``He knows the deep inside story of the Pyongyang leadership, which we will be able to hear for the first time,'' said Izumi, who said he has had five long face-to-face discussions with Hwang during his many visits to North Korea.
Izumi said he found Hwang to be a man of great intellect. He said Hwang shifted easily from long lectures on the juche philosophy to more-practical discussions of the Japanese-North Korean relationship; and, unlike some North Korean officials, he seemed willing to move beyond the strict party line in his reasoning.
``I got the impression he was a very pragmatic and flexible man,'' Izumi said.
Many U.S. and South Korean analysts find full-time employment trying to understand the enigmatic and reclusive Kim Jong Il, who rarely speaks in public and is not known to have ever met an American. The details of Kim's life are largely shrouded in myths created by a state-run propaganda machine, and the details of his thinking and motivations are anyone's guess.
In Seoul, there was little open gloating among government officials as foreign, defense, unification and national-security ministers held an emergency meeting to discuss how to handle an issue that has surely infuriated North Korea.
``This is big, big news here,'' said a senior South Korean government official. ``He's the most important theoretician of juche, which is the foundation of the whole country. This will have enormous, tremendous impact on the North Korean people if they find out he has defected.''
Listed as 72 or 74 in different publications, Hwang was a contemporary of and aide to Kim's father, North Korean founder Kim Il Sung. When the elder Kim died in 1994, Hwang was on the official committee that planned his funeral.
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