SEOUL — In 1997, a septuagenarian North Korean academic on a business trip to Beijing told his minders that he was going out to buy a birthday present for his country's leader, Kim Jong Il. Instead, he caught a taxi and headed straight for the South Korean Embassy, becoming the highest-ranking North Korean to defect.
Hwang Jang Yop, now 80, has lived in South Korea since, heading his own think tank and prolifically churning out tomes denouncing the Communist regime to the north. But the South Korean government has kept him under virtual house arrest, seldom permitting him to speak to foreigners or to speak abroad for fear that too much exposure would upset the fragile calm on the peninsula.
This long seclusion is set to end this week when he makes a long-anticipated -- and controversial -- visit to the United States. During the eight-day tour at the invitation of a conservative think tank, Hwang is expected to talk to members of Congress as well as officials of the State Department and White House.
Critics of the North Korean regime hope that Hwang's debut appearance will galvanize opposition to Kim and that Hwang himself could become at least the symbolic head of a government in exile -- the Ahmad Chalabi of North Korea, as it were.
"We would like to see something along the lines of an Iraqi National Congress," said political activist Douglas Shin, referring to the group headed by Chalabi, a leading figure in the Iraqi opposition before the fall of President Saddam Hussein.
"This idea is still in its inception, but what we are talking about is something that could function as a transitory government when North Korea collapses," said Shin, a Korean American pastor who lives in Artesia and works frequently with German anti-North Korean activist Norbert Vollertsen. "Hwang is not a young man, but he is a commanding figure who has known Kim Jong Il personally and has a lot of personal popularity."
But Hwang's trip to Washington remains divisive, with some South Korean lawmakers here complaining that it could impede chances for another round of six-party diplomatic negotiations on North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
Until he defected, Hwang was considered the eminence grise of North Korea, the leading ideologue behind juche, its philosophy of self-reliance. He served as president of North Korea's top academic institution, Kim Il Sung University, and as a secretary of the ruling Korean Workers' Party.
