Manager of Ryugyong restaurant testifies NIS told him to bring waitresses to South Korea

Posted on : 2018-07-16 17:18 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
“NIS promised South Korean citizenship and management of restaurant in Southeast Asia”
The waitresses of Ryugyong restaurant in Ningbo
The waitresses of Ryugyong restaurant in Ningbo

Amid mounting claims that South Korea’s National Intelligence Service under former president Park Geun-hye orchestrated the defection of 12 waitresses from the North Korean Ryugyong restaurant in Ningbo, a city in China's Zhejiang Province, in Apr. 2016, Huh Gang-il, the manager of that restaurant, claimed on July 15 that the NIS recruited him with the promise that it would put him in charge of a restaurant in Southeast Asia if he brought the waitresses to South Korea.

“I was working with the NIS, and they told me that if I brought the waitresses, they would give us South Korean citizenship and set up a restaurant in Southeast Asia that would double as an NIS safe house. They lured me with the promise that I could run the restaurant with the waitresses,” Huh said in an interview with Yonhap News.

“Most of [the waitresses] followed me on the understanding that we were going to be working at a restaurant in Southeast Asia and only figured out [where we were going] when they boarded a plane bound for South Korea,” he said.

Huh’s claims are consistent with the remarks made by Tomas Quintana, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in North Korea, during a press conference on July 10. Quintana said that some of the waitresses came to South Korea without knowing where they were going.

The allegations that the NIS was behind the defection appear to be gaining force. But Seoul still maintains its official position that “the waitresses apparently entered the country of their own free will” (in the words of Unification Ministry spokesperson Baik Tae-hyun), further fueling the controversy. During his press conference on July 10, Quintana recommended that the South Korean government “carry out a total and independent investigation to find out as soon as possible who is responsible.”

The Ryugyong waitresses who returned to North Korea instead of defecting said during interviews with CNN on Apr. 21, 2016, and with Nippon TV on Sept. 29, 2016, that Huh had tricked the waitresses into thinking they were going to a restaurant in Malaysia, in Southeast Asia.

During his interview with Yonhap, Huh also said that when he had been struggling to decide whether or not to defect, NIS agents had threatened him, suggesting that his own defection had not been entirely voluntary. But this contradicts the claims of the waitresses who returned to North Korea that “the restaurant manager and a South Korean businessperson had deceived the waitresses and planned and carried out the defection under orders from the South Korean government.” Huh also reportedly told MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society during two interviews in 2016 that he had defected for fear that he would be sent to North Korea for punishment because he had been watching South Korean movies and dramas online. This suggests that Huh’s reasons for defecting and his awareness of what was happening may have been different from those of the waitresses.

By Lee Je-hun, senior staff writer

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