When he talks about North Korea, Jean-Baptiste Kim still looks wistful. ‘They treated me like a prince,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I wish I could go back.’ He can’t. If he did his life would be in serious danger, because for 11 years Kim was a spokesperson for the Kim Jong-Il government. For 11 years, he was a public defender of a despotic regime that, human rights groups say, tortures its citizens, denies them freedom of information and incarcerates many of them in gulag-style prison camps; a regime that is responsible for the famine that looks set to sweep North Korea this year. But on New Year’s Day 2007, Jean-Baptiste Kim resigned his job and he is now (and will remain) a mobile phone salesman in New Malden, Surrey.
Jean-Baptiste Kim was once such a good PR man for the North Korean government that he even told the Guardian that it was ‘a joke’ that Kim Jong-Il has not yet won the Nobel Peace Prize.
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