SEOUL, South Korea -- The son of a former South Korean foreign minister who fled to North Korea in the 1980s also defected to the North last week, according to the North's state-run news media.
The minister's son -- Choe In-guk, 73 -- arrived in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, on Saturday to "resettle permanently" in the North, according to a report Sunday from a website called Uriminzokkiri, which is run by the North Korean government. The website said that he planned to follow his parents in "dedicating his life to realizing Korean unification."
Choe is the son of Choe Dok-shin, a former South Korean foreign minister who defected to the North in 1986, becoming the highest-profile South Korean to do so since the 1950-53 Korean War. Choe Dok-shin was also a former military general and had served as South Korea's ambassador to West Germany.
The North Korean website carried photographs and video footage showing officials welcoming Choe with flowers at Pyongyang's international airport. In his arrival statement, Choe called the North, where both his parents are buried, "my true fatherland."
South Korea was trying to determine the circumstances of Choe's travel to the North, Lee Sang-min, spokesman for the South's Unification Ministry, said Monday. All South Korean citizens must receive government approval before traveling to the North. Choe did not have such permission, Lee said.
Although more than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to the South since a famine hit the North in the 1990s, only a handful of South Koreans have defected to the North in the past decade.
Choe's case drew special attention in South Korea because of his family's history.
His father fled to the United States in 1976 with his wife, Ryu Mi-yong, after he grew disgruntled with Park Chung-hee, who was then the military dictator of South Korea. The couple defected to the North in 1986.
North Korea gave the couple a lavish welcome, showering Choe with a series of high-level but largely ceremonial posts like vice chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, an agency dealing with South Korean relations, and head of the Chondoist Chongu Party, a political group affiliated with a Korean religion called Chondo.
Ryu also held various jobs, including as a member of the presidium of the North's rubber-stamp parliament.
Choe Dok-shin died in 1989, and his wife, Ryu, died in 2016. Both were buried in the Patriotic Martyrs' Cemetery in Pyongyang. Also buried there were their fathers, both of whom were treated in the North as patriots for their struggle against Japanese colonialists who ruled Korea from 1910 to 1945.
After his parents defected to the North, the younger Choe, who was left behind in the South, lived under surveillance during the military dictatorship. He had a tearful reunion with his mother in 2000 when Ryu visited Seoul, the South Korean capital, for government-arranged family reunions of hundreds of older people from both Koreas who were separated from their relatives during the Korean War.
South Korea has since allowed Choe to travel to the North 12 times so that he could visit his parents' graves, South Korean officials said. He left a wife and two adult children in the South when he defected, according to the South Korean news media.
The two Koreas are divided by the world's most heavily guarded border.
It is highly unusual for South Koreans to defect to the North or to enter the country illegally. At least six South Koreans who have been detained in the North in recent years remain there, including three missionaries who were sentenced to hard labor for life on spying and other charges.
But the North has also returned some South Korean detainees in recent years.
Last year, North Korea released a South Korean citizen who was held for illegal entry. In 2014, the country returned a South Korean man who had fled to the North to escape his economic difficulties. The year before, it said it had "leniently pardoned" and sent back six South Korean men who had been held in the North on charges of illegal entry.
A Section on 07/09/2019