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From despot’s PR man to Surrey salesman

Christopher Michael

Wednesday, 9th April 2008

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

During one of their many heart-to-heart conversations, the diplomat told Kim that North Korea desperately needed someone like him: a westernised civilian from South Korea who spoke French and English but was willing to stick up publicly for Kim Jong-Il. And on Oon Yung’s advice, Kim set up and ran (from bases in France, England and North Korea) a propaganda website called Voice of Korea. His main job was to give interviews to various newspapers defending Kim Jong-Il’s record. This he did. And he also helped to arrange import-export deals with his reclusive fatherland. In return for this, the grateful administration in Pyongyang paid him a comfortable income, and on his frequent trips to North Korea he was treated like a prince. ‘I was a high officer. I had great dinners,’ he says. ‘But all the time I was being educated in the juche ideology.’

Juche is North Korea’s creepy, semi-religious take on socialism. It’s a strange mix of communist ideals, military-industrial corporatism and Stalinist personality cult centring around Kim Jong-Il and the grinning undead spectre of his father, Kim Il-Sung. It’s pretty much impossible to explain to outsiders — but over the next 11 years, Kim tried his hardest. As well as running Voice of Korea, he gave interviews supporting the country’s communist rule. The world had North Korea all wrong, he said. It was just a matter of different lifestyles. After all, did not America and the UK have poverty too? And wasn’t it because of international sanctions arising from anti-communist bias that North Korea was kept so poor? Had everyone forgotten about Japanese colonialism and all those US troops massed north of Seoul?

Then came Jean-Baptiste Kim’s enlightenment. It began with an email from a heavy metal band. They had read an interview with him in the Norwegian press, and were curious: could they play a gig in Pyongyang? ‘Why not?’ thought Kim. Life in North Korea was such a party, there was no reason he shouldn’t throw a rock festival. ‘North Korea was hungry for positive PR and money,’ says Kim, ‘and it seemed like a good way to bring in both.’ Kim ran the idea by his superiors. They gave him the thumbs up. So Kim made the announcement on Voice of Korea, and the Western press picked up on the story. The festival would be called Rock for Peace, an event of ‘capitalist popular music’ in Pyongyang. It would be open to any band — as long as they promised not to sing ‘admirations on war, sex, violence, murder, drug, rape, non-governmental society, imperialism, colonialism, racism, anti-DPRK and anti-socialism.’

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