Posted January 4, 2023, 6:12 amUpdated January 4, 2023 at 6:14 am
He had disappeared from North Korean state media in late December 2019, after appearing in a last photo in the middle of a meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party, the formation that has reigned over the country for more than seventy years. Since then, specialists in the very tormented political life of North Korea have wondered about the fate of Ri Yong-ho, the regime’s former foreign minister and protagonist of the brief resumption of negotiations between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. This Wednesday, the Japanese newspaper “Yomiuri Shimbun” said that the former regime leader was recently purged.
Experts quickly recalled that this information would be difficult to confirm since North Korean power is opaque. In the past, the Japanese and South Korean media have sometimes erroneously announced the elimination of leaders close to Kim Jong-un who have finally reappeared in good health alongside the dictator. In the morning, South Korean authorities indicated they would verify the information from Japanese media.
A link to the embassy in London
According to the “Yomiuri”, Ri Yong-ho and “four or five” former senior foreign ministry officials were executed “between the summer and autumn of 2022” as part of a campaign to eliminate diplomats linked to at the North Korean Embassy in Great Britain.
English-speaking after studying at the prestigious Pyongyang University of Foreign Languages, Ri Yong-ho had himself been ambassador to London between 2003 and 2007 before assuming, upon returning to Korea, the position of deputy foreign minister in 2010, later finally promoted to head of ministry in 2016.
After having represented Kim Jong-un, in the early 2010s, in various sessions of multilateral negotiations on the disarmament of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, he had been one of the protagonists of the “warming up” phase of relations between Pyongyang and Washington between 2017 and 2019. He had notably coordinated the main summits, in 2018 and 2019, in Singapore and then in Hanoi, between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump before being fired from management positions following the failure of this strategy of “reconciliation “. North Korea, which has rejected any denuclearization, has never obtained, as it had hoped during the summits, the slightest promise of lifting the international sanctions that are suffocating its economy.
Replaced in 2020 as foreign minister by Ri Song-gwon, Ri Yong-ho has not appeared in any other North Korean power organization chart.
An embarrassing defection
Inquiring about his “disappearance” last year in a note posted on the Stimson Center’s North Korea Leadership Watch website, researcher Michael Madden indicated that the former diplomat may also have been sanctioned for serious incidents within his ministry. The expert had in particular highlighted the defection in early 2019 of Jo Song-gil, the former North Korean ambassador to Italy. An expert in the illegal fundraising strategies of Kim Jong-un’s clan, he is the most prominent North Korean official to enter South Korea since the 1997 defection of a former Workers’ Party secretary.
Since coming to power in late 2011, following the death of his father Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un has ordered several arrests and executions of regime officials deemed hostile to his policies or his clan. In 2013, the young dictator had his uncle and former mentor Jang Song-thaek eliminated in the name of the fight “against the factional filth that had infected the Party”.
