Kim’s mysterious envoy Mr Ri returns
‘Refined’ diplomat takes regime’s case to the UN Human Rights Council
The young Kim Jong-un may be the public face of isolated North Korea, but the man who represents Pyongyang on the international stage is an urbane 75-year-old who lived under an assumed name for decades and survived a vicious purge more than a year ago.
Now North Korea’s foreign minister and one of the most powerful men in the regime, Ri Su-yong was rumoured to have been executed along with his mentor Jang Song-thaek, Mr Kim’s uncle, and several of his aides.
But the French-speaking Mr Ri, who acted as Mr Kim’s surrogate father when he was at a Swiss school, is touring international capitals again, defending his country’s nuclear capability and trying to parry allegations of human rights abuses.
Like Jang, Mr Ri is known as a powerful and close family confidant, open to economic reforms. But Jang fell afoul of the various factions around Mr Kim, possibly because of his rapid rise to power.
Mr Ri returns to Switzerland this week, where he spent two decades as North Korea’s envoy to Berne and the United Nations in Geneva and became doyen of the diplomatic corps.
Yesterday, he was due to make North Korea’s first address to the UN Human Rights Council, whose inquiry last year accused the regime of committing violations tantamount to crimes against humanity.
“He always struck me as very savvy and sophisticated for a North Korean diplomat. Sophisticated in the sense that he knows the score,” said one Geneva-based official who attended frequent diplomatic meetings with Mr Ri.
Unlike other diplomats from North Korea, officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Mr Ri refrained from prefacing his statements with the ideological lectures and ranting against the West that are a hallmark of Pyongyang.
“His formulations were always within acceptable parameters; he was politically correct towards his own country,” the official said. “He was keeping open channels of communication.”
“He was very pleasant, urbane, not a thug. He was always reputed to be the family’s fixer, whatever needed fixing.”
Until 2010, he was known as Ri Chol, and was a close aide and friend of Kim Jongil, Kim Jong-un’s father, and by popular account his money-man in Europe. Mr Ri was recalled to Pyongyang in 2010 and in one of the last published photographs of Kim Jong-il before his death in 2011, he is seen standing close to him, with slicked-back hair and thickrimmed spectacles.
“It’s kind of a mystery why he called himself Ri Chol,” said Michael Madden, an expert on the Pyongyang leadership. “There are several of these senior guys that are close to the centre in Pyongyang and they use different names.” A career diplomat, Mr Ri was first dispatched to Switzerland in the early 1980s to establish an official North Korean presence, records held by South Korea’s Ministry of Unification show.
But according to a memoir written by Song Hye-rang, the aunt of Kim Jong-un’s half-brother, Mr Ri was sent to the Alpine country with another role — to serve in loco parentis to Kim Jong-il’s eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, who now lives in effective exile.
It was Kim Jong-un’s powerful uncle Jang who recruited Mr Ri to seek out a suitable residence and school in Switzerland, wrote Ms Song, who later defected in Geneva.
But driven by paranoia that South Korean spies might kidnap the dictator’s son, Mr Ri spent his early Swiss days in an apartment across the road from the school’s gate, which he watched with a pair of binoculars, according to the memoir.