A 25-year-old North Korean soldier whose brazen escape to South Korea in a hail of gunfire last year made global headlines said Monday that most young people in the North have no loyalty to the government in Pyongyang.
In his first interview since the dramatic incident last November, Oh Chong-song confirmed he is the son of a North Korean military general and said he has no regrets about defecting from the North.
Mr. Oh’s escape drew international attention when video circulated showing his sudden scramble through the woods across the border at the Panmunjom truce village in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) — under a hail of rifle fire from his former North Korean comrades.
Reports at the time said he was hospitalized with serious injuries in South Korea after the successful escape, and that doctors treating him found other problems with his health, including an infection caused by parasitic worms.
In an interview this week with Japan’s Sankei Shimbun newspaper, Mr. Oh for the first time revealed details that led up to his defection from the North, explaining that he had been drinking alcohol away from his post in the DMZ after some unspecified trouble with friends.
According to a translation of the interview reported by Agence France-Presse, Mr. Oh broke through a North Korean checkpoint on his way back to his DMZ post and, fearing execution, suddenly decided to keep going, running for the South’s border.
“I feared I could be executed if I went back, so I crossed the border,” he was quoted as saying, adding he had no regrets about defecting, according to the Agence France-Presse report on the Sankei Shimbun interview.
Mr. Oh also spoke of his experience growing up “upper class” in North Korea as the son of a military general. Despite his privileged upbringing, he said, he felt no allegiance to the North’s leadership.
“Inside the North, people, and especially the younger generation, are indifferent to each other, politics, and their leaders, and there is no sense of loyalty,” Mr. Oh said, adding he personally was “indifferent” to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — the third generation of the Kim family to lead the North.
“Probably 80 percent of my generation is indifferent and has no loyalty,” he was quoted as saying. “It is natural to have no interest nor loyalty since the hereditary system is taken as a given, regardless of its inability to feed people.”
At the same time, Mr. Oh said, he understood why his former comrades shot at him as he was fleeing.
“If they didn’t shoot, they would face heavy punishment,” he said. “So if I was them, I would have done the same.”
His escape came at a moment of heightened tension between North and South Korea and between Pyongyang and Washington.
Last November was marked by threats and provocations from the Kim regime, following a series of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missile tests by the North — and by President Trump’s threat at the time to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea if it did not cease such tests.
The year since has seen a near-unprecedented easing of tension amid a push by the Trump administration and the government of South Korean President Moon Jae-in for diplomacy with the Kim regime, although it remains to been seen whether the regime is serious about abandoning its nuclear weapons.
Trump administration officials say they are hoping Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim will hold a second face-to-face summit sometime in early 2019 to build on denuclearization talks that have struggled to make progress since the two held their first historic summit in Singapore in June.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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