Park Choong-kwon: North Korean defector elected in South Korea

As a young man, Park Choong-Kwon helped build the nuclear missiles that his homeland, North Korea, blasted off from time to time to threaten the West.

Now he sits in its democratic neighbour’s legislature – a member of South Korea’s parliament elected just this week.

When people migrate from authoritarian regimes to liberal democracies, they dream of a better life, of opportunities. A refugee becoming a lawmaker, or even one day president? It’s possible.

But for a North Korean, it’s extraordinary. Park, at age 37, is just the fourth escapee ever to become a parliamentarian in the South.

“I came to South Korea with nothing,” he told the BBC earlier this week, “and now I’ve entered the political arena.

“I see all of this as the power of our liberal democracy and I think it’s all possible because our citizens made it happen. It is a miracle and a blessing.”

For North Korean watchers, it’s also a sign of progress.

“There are tens of thousands of North Koreans who voted with their feet, voted against the oppression of that regime with their lives – some lost – but others didn’t, and the world is benefiting from them,” says Sandra Fahy, an associate professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who’s researched life in North Korea.

“Who better to understand the importance of democratic representation and political engagement than those who have lived in a world where it was forbidden?”

Park escaped the clutches of the North Korean state a decade and a half ago when he was 23, having breathed not a word of his plans to his parents and other family members. It was too risky, and if they had known, that could have put them in peril, he says.

He had spent his last three years embedded in the National Defense University – one of the elite students seen as the next generation entrusted with developing the North’s nuclear weapons technology.

While relatively sheltered in the capital, he had grown up in the North in the 1990s, the period of massive famine in the country where millions died and desperate citizens turned to black market goods.

But he was exposed to life outside – through South Korean TV shows smuggled in and study abroad in China, where his fixation on new ideas drew scrutiny from his minders.

By the time he graduated university, he told Korean media, he had realised “how completely wrong and corrupt the North Korean regime was”.

So he hatched his plan and waited.

The release came one day in April 2009. North Korea that day had just managed to successfully launch its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) – the very same weapon he had toiled away for years on building. The whole country was “in a celebratory mood”; he saw the opportunity and slipped away the next morning under the cover of the jubilant noise.

Getting out was an ordeal of course – he chose the faster but vastly more expensive route to China, which cost nearly 10 million won (£5,800 pounds; $7,300). Despite the cost, the fake passport provided by the broker was a shoddy certificate.

But in a interview with NK News last year, he recalled the moment he realised he was potentially free. Clambering onto the Chinese-side banks of the Tumen River, there was a mingled sense of freedom and loss – leaving him feeling like an “international orphan”.

Another life-changing moment came some time later when he received his South Korean passport – one of the happiest moments of his life, he says.

Compared to many other defectors from the North, about 35,000 of whom have settled in the South since the 1990s, Park adapted quickly to his new life, a challenge smoothed out by his elite background and education.

He was accepted into the country’s most prestigious university – Seoul National University – where he earned a PhD in materials science and engineering, and then landed a highly coveted job at Hyundai Steel, one of the South’s powerhouse conglomerates.

And then the president’s party came knocking.

Park told the BBC he hadn’t ever considered entering politics, but when the People Power Party reached out, he felt he wanted to give back through public service.

As the number two delegate on the ruling party’s list for proportional voting seats, he was essentially guaranteed a spot in Wednesday’s elections – no matter how unfavourable the turnout. The results in the end were terrible for the deeply unpopular President Yoon Suk-yeol and his ruling PPP.

But Park is forward-facing and has big plans now as an elected lawmaker.

In the South’s previous parliament, there had already been two sitting…