Travis King defected to North Korea to escape “mistreatment and racial discrimination in the US Army,” Pyongyang’s state media said yesterday, in its first official confirmation that it is holding the US soldier.
A private second class with a checkered disciplinary record, King was due to fly back to the US last month, but instead slipped out of South Korea’s main airport, joined a tourist trip to the demilitarized zone and ran across the border into North Korea.
The US has previously said that King crossed the border at the Joint Security Area in the demilitarized zone separating the North and the South “willfully and without authorization.”
Photo: AFP
Following a North Korean investigation, King “admitted that he illegally intruded,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.
“Travis King confessed that he had decided to come over to the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] as he harbored ill feeling against inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination within the US Army,” KCNA said.
King “came to be kept under control by soldiers of the Korean People’s Army” after he crossed the border, it said.
“He also expressed his willingness to seek refuge in the DPRK or a third country, saying that he was disillusioned at the unequal American society,” KCNA said, adding that a government investigation was still ongoing.
The UN Command, which oversees the armistice that ended fighting in the Korean War, last month confirmed it had begun a conversation with North Korea over King.
However, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at the time that while contact had been made with Pyongyang, Washington still had no idea where King was or in what condition.
KCNA did not provide any details about King’s health or location, or about what they planned to do with him.
North Korea’s first official comment on King was pure propaganda, said Soo Kim, policy practice area lead at LMI Consulting and a former CIA analyst.
“King’s crossing into North Korea provided the Kim [Jong-un] regime an opportunity in several ways, the first of which is, of course, the potential for negotiations with the US over King’s release,” she said, adding that Pyongyang has “tough negotiators,” so it would not be easy for Washington to secure his release.
Pyongyang has a long history of detaining Americans and using them as bargaining chips in bilateral negotiations.
“It’s also an opportunity for the regime propaganda to do its thing — to spin the situation in such a way as to criticize the US and express Pyongyang’s deep-rooted hostility towards Washington,” she added.
Just before it issued its comments on King, KCNA put out a statement criticizing discussion of Pyongyang’s rights record at the UN, describing the US as “the anti-people empire of evils, totally depraved due to all sorts of social evils.”
“Not content with conniving at and fostering racial discrimination, gun-related crimes, child maltreatment and forced labor rampant in its society, the US has imposed unethical human rights standards on other countries and fomented internal unrest and confusion,” the statement read.
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