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Sunday 6 July 2008

From despot’s PR man to Surrey salesman

Christopher Michael talks to Jean-Baptiste Kim, a former spokesman for Kim Jong-Il’s tyranny in Pyongyang, who grasped the truth about the regime

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When he talks about North Korea, Jean-Baptiste Kim still looks wistful. ‘They treated me like a prince,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I wish I could go back.’ He can’t. If he did his life would be in serious danger, because for 11 years Kim was a spokesperson for the Kim Jong-Il government. For 11 years, he was a public defender of a despotic regime that, human rights groups say, tortures its citizens, denies them freedom of information and incarcerates many of them in gulag-style prison camps; a regime that is responsible for the famine that looks set to sweep North Korea this year. But on New Year’s Day 2007, Jean-Baptiste Kim resigned his job and he is now (and will remain) a mobile phone salesman in New Malden, Surrey.

Jean-Baptiste Kim was once such a good PR man for the North Korean government that he even told the Guardian that it was ‘a joke’ that Kim Jong-Il has not yet won the Nobel Peace Prize. That was before he came face to face with some of the horrible realities of his beloved ‘fatherland’. ‘Now I’m just an ordinary guy in New Malden,’ he says, though perhaps not every ordinary New Malden guy has seven locks on his office door.

Kim’s story begins back in South Korea where he grew up under difficult circumstances. His father was a pro-democracy activist (South Korea only started becoming democratic in the 1980s), and was often incarcerated by various autocratic regimes for political agitation. ‘Life was miserable for us,’ Kim recalls. ‘My dad was always hiding or in prison. We were watched by the police 24 hours a day and the teachers beat me because I didn’t have money to pay for school. My hate grew for South Korea.’

So at 18, Kim fled to France where he joined the Foreign Legion despite knowing only one French word —‘Oui!’ — and over the next decade he trained, learned French, and saw active duty near Zagreb in Croatia. Then one day in 1996, after he’d returned to Paris, Kim was approached by a North Korean diplomat. The man’s name was Oon Yung. Kim calls meeting Oon Yung the most important experience of his life. The way Oon Yung set about grooming Kim to be a PR man for Kim Jong-Il was frighteningly professional. ‘He became my father,’ Kim says. ‘He talked like a father, he took care of me just like a father. Everything he told me, I believed. Everything he asked me to do, I did.’

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