A North Korean soldier who defected by running across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) into South Korea last year claimed on Wednesday that remarks allegedly denigrating the South Korean military were taken out of context and says the newspaper publishing them has already apologized.
Oh Chong-song (sometimes spelled Oh Jeong-seon), believed to be 25 years old, issued his first interview since defecting in November 2017 to Japan’s Sankei Shimbun last week. Oh, who refused to show his face in a video interview and identified himself as the son of a high-ranking military official, used the interview to disparage the Kim regime, stating that most young people are “indifferent” towards communism or worshipping the Kim family, and few can afford to eat properly.
The interview also included remarks about what training for the North Korean military is like. According to Sankei, Oh described the South Korean army as “an army that isn’t so much like one,” prompting outrage in South Korea.
The South Korean news service Yonhap reported that Oh told their journalists that he did not mean any offense by the remarks and demanded an apology from Sankei for running the remarks with “distorted facts.”
“All I said was how different (the South Korean) Army is compared with the North’s, in terms of training and such, because we need to serve a lot longer term than South Korean men,” Oh reportedly told Yonhap. “And the media twisted my story in a weird way.”
Oh insists that he meant no offense to the South Korean military, which can afford far higher turnover than the North, where military service is a pillar of life as the country invests almost exclusively in developing war powers to antagonize Seoul and Washington.
Yonhap describes Sankei Shimbun as a “far-right” newspaper, which Oh says he was not aware of when he accepted the interview.
Oh’s interview with Sankei revealed his identity, his reason for defecting, and his general opinions of dictator Kim Jong-un. Oh defected in dramatic fashion last year, caught on video running into North Korea through the world’s most fortified border as fellow North Korean soldiers shot at him.
Oh insisted in his interview that his defection was not political. Instead, he claimed, he had engaged in a dispute with fellow military friends earlier in the day that had led him to drink. He claims he ran across the border drunk when he realized border patrol soldiers were targeting him.
“I crossed over because there was a possibility of being executed,” he explained, “but I do not regret it.”
Oh also claimed that he had no strong feelings politically despite being the member of a well-connected military family. He claimed his monthly salary was usually enough to buy only one cigarette, while his higher ranking father could typically afford two cigarettes with an entire monthly salary. The scarcity and consistent forced displays of loyalty have numbed his generation, he insisted.
“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,” he stated. “Probably 80 percent of my generation is indifferent and has no loyalty.”
The North Korean government has not responded to the interview or acknowledged Oh’s defection. Pyongyang only typically does so with mass defections or particularly embarrassing instances of refugees attacking the regime, most notably the mass defection of the staff of 13 workers at a North Korean restaurant in China in 2016. At the time, North Korea insisted that their escape was an “abduction” on the part of the government of then-South Korean President Park Geun-hye. North Korean officials still routinely demand that the United Nations force the refugees to return to their native country, where they likely face a lifetime in forced labor camps – and the same punishment for up to three generations of their families – or execution.