North Korean Defects from Embassy in Ethiopia

Yonhap and AFP are both reporting that a 40 year-old North Korean “medic” at the embassy in Addis Ababa defected to South Korea last October. The man is now safely in Seoul.

Yonhap said the communist state’s embassy protested strongly, making a threatening call to the South Korean mission.

President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss among yourselves.

North Korean officials used cars to stage protests outside the building where Kim stayed for up to three weeks, YTN said.

How immature. Why can’t these people just do what any normal government would do and publicly execute the defector’s entire family as a lesson to others? (Stop already — it’s not as if I’m giving these thugs ideas.)

Although Yonhap had described the defector as a “diplomat,” it’s more likely he was a member of this 31-member medical delegation dispatched from North Korea to Ethiopia last year. North Korea’s relations with Ethiopia are strong enough that Ethiopian kids have been shipped off to visit Pyongyang (a lovely time was had by all, I’m sure) and even banded together into — sit down for this — an “Ethiopian Youth Study Group of the Juche Idea,” which has to be about the oddest combination I’ve heard of since the Julia Roberts / Lyle Lovett marriage. In 2007, Kim Yong Nam even paid a visit to Addis Ababa.

By now, you’re already wondering how I’m going to find a cynical angle in the natural, fraternal warmth that has bound North Koreans and Ethiopians in comradeship since the time of King Tangun, and I suppose your suspicions are well placed, because Ethiopia is also a major North Korean arms client, or was. Recall that shortly after Chris Hill secured Peace in Our Time and signed us up for Agreed Framework II, someone did us the great disservice of catching the North Koreans red-handed selling arms, including tank parts, to Ethiopia, a flagrant violation of UNSCR 1718. No matter, said the State Department, as other matters took precedence in those times. That pretty much spelled the end of UNSCR 1718 as an effective resolution, not even six months after its passage. It took another nuclear test and UNSCR 1874 to revive it.

For years, reports have floated around that North Korean embassies were expected to be self-financing, often through illegal activity. One interesting line of speculation about this defection is that if the enforcement of UNSCR 1874 is working fairly well, the Ethiopians aren’t buying and the embassy’s commissary isn’t serving so much meat soup these days, either.