Former North Korean diplomat Tae Yong-ho has been named the new leader of South Korea’s presidential advisory council on unification.
This makes him the highest-ranking defector among the thousands who resettled in the South – and the first to receive a vice-ministerial position.
Tae, 62, was Pyongyang’s deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom before fleeing to South Korea in 2016.
Pyongyang has denounced him as “human scum” and accused him of embezzlement of state funds and other crimes.
Tae became the first former North Korean to win a seat in South Korea’s National Assembly in 2020.
He failed to secure a second term in April’s parliamentary elections, but in his new role, he will advise South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s cabinet on the peaceful unification of Korea.
“He is the right person to help establish a policy of peaceful unification based on liberal democracy and garner support at home and abroad,” the presidential office said on Thursday.
Born in Pyongyang in 1962, Tae joined the foreign service at age 27 and spent nearly 30 years working under three generations of the ruling Kim dynasty.
He has said in previous statements that he left North Korea because he did not want his children to have “miserable lives.” He also cited distaste for Kim Jong Un’s regime and expressed admiration for South Korea’s democracy.
In a memoir published this year, Tae wrote about the excesses of the North Korean elite and the depth of the personality cult built around the Kims.
Since his defection, he has defended the use of “soft power” to weaken Kim’s regime and called for an exchange of prisoners between North and South.
Tensions between the Koreas have risen in recent months, with Seoul resuming propaganda broadcasts to the North on Friday in response to Pyongyang launching thousands of garbage-carrying balloons to the South.
Reports based on satellite images also suggest that North Korea may be strengthening its military presence and building walls along its border with the South.
In December last year, around 34,000 people defected from the North to the South, according to estimates from the Seoul Ministry of Unification.
Many do this by crossing the border into China and then into South Korea. In South Korea, they automatically receive citizenship and receive some money for resettlement.
Earlier this week, Seoul’s spy agency confirmed another high-profile defection from a former diplomat recently stationed in Cuba.
Local reports identified the man as 52-year-old Ri Il Kyu and quoted him as saying he fled because of “disillusionment with the North Korean regime and a bleak future.”
“Every North Korean thinks at least once about living in South Korea,” the Chosun Ilbo newspaper quoted him as saying.
Last Sunday, South Korea marked its first North Korean Defectors Day, during which Yoon Suk Yeol promised better financial support for defectors and tax incentives for companies that hire them.
