North Korean leader Kim Jong-un might be the public face of North Korea, but the man who represents Pyongyang on the international stage is an urbane 75-year-old who lived under an assumed name for decades and survived a vicious purge more than a year ago.
North Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs Ri Su-yong — one of the most powerful men in the regime — was rumored to have been executed along with several of his aides and his mentor, Kim’s uncle, Jang Song-thaek.
However, the French-speaking Ri, who acted as Kim’s surrogate father when he was at a Swiss school, is touring international capitals again, defending his nation’s nuclear capability and trying to parry allegations of human rights abuses.
Like Jang, Ri is known as a powerful and close family confidant, open to economic reforms. However, Jang fell afoul of the various factions around Kim, possibly because of his rapid rise to power.
Ri returns to Switzerland this week, where he spent two decades as North Korea’s envoy to Berne and the UN in Geneva and became doyen of the diplomatic corps.
He is scheduled today to make the North’s first address to the UN Human Rights Council, whose independent inquiry last year accused the regime of committing violations tantamount to crimes against humanity.
“He always struck me as very savvy and sophisticated for a North Korean diplomat. Sophisticated in the sense that he knows the score,” one Geneva-based official who attended frequent diplomatic meetings with Ri said.
Unlike other North Korean diplomats, Ri refrained from prefacing his statements with the ideological lectures and ranting against the West that are a hallmark of Pyongyang.
“His formulations were always within acceptable parameters; he was politically correct toward his own country,” the official told reporters. “He was keeping open channels of communication... He was very pleasant, urbane, not a thug. He was always reputed to be the family’s fixer, whatever needed fixing.”
Until 2010, he was known as Ri Chol, and was a close aide and friend of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and by popular account his money-man in Europe. Ri was recalled to Pyongyang in 2010 and in one of the last published photographs of Kim Jong-il before his death in 2011, he is seen standing close to him.
“It’s kind of a mystery why he called himself Ri-chol,” North Korean leadership expert Michael Madden said. “There are several of these senior guys that are close to the center in Pyongyang and they use different names.”
A career diplomat, Ri was first dispatched to Switzerland in the early 1980s to establish an official North Korean presence, South Korean records show.
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