Lives of North Korean Diplomats Restricted

Christopher Torchia| Jakarta, Indonesia | July 1

AP - When North Korean diplomats venture out of their new embassy compound in a leafy, residential neighborhood here, they rarely do so alone.

At official functions, they don't mingle much.

Under North Korea's Cold War-era mentality, any number of temptations or threats await in the steamy streets of Jakarta beyond the embassy gates: a blackmail bid, a chance to defect, an opportunity to turn spy.

"They go out in pairs because they're policing themselves," said Ken Conboy, author of "Intel: Inside Indonesia's Intelligence Service."

The same goes for North Korean envoys in the roughly 50 countries that host North Korean diplomatic missions, which are usually bare-bones operations because funding from Pyongyang is scarce. In some cases, diplomats have allegedly turned to drug trafficking to make ends meet.

As much as they keep to themselves, diplomats from perhaps the most reclusive country in the world are easy to spot. On the lapels of their dark suits, they wear pins bearing the image of Kim Il Sung, who founded North Korea in 1948 and is revered back home a decade after his death in the form of statues, portraits and reams of state propaganda.

His son, Kim Jong Il, is now in charge. The younger Kim's foreign minister, Paek Nam Sun, is in Indonesia this week to attend an Asia-Pacific ministerial forum. He is staying at Jakarta's J.W. Marriott hotel, where a suicide bombing that was blamed on Islamic militants killed 12 people last year.

Just over a mile away sits the North Korean embassy, one of the country's larger missions in Southeast Asia. Ringed by a high brick wall, the two-story building with brown roof tiles sits behind Blora, an area packed with bars that play traditional "dangdut" music, and near Taman Lawang, where transvestite prostitutes wait for customers.

The North Korean embassy has moved several times over the years, each time to smaller quarters. A visitor to the embassy last year said a Korean woman sleeping in a cot roused herself to open the gate, and that there were no air conditioners in the windows - a must in tropical Jakarta.

Indonesia's Foreign Ministry handbook lists 20 North Korean diplomats, including Ambassador Jang Chang Chon, former head of his ministry's bureau on U.S. affairs and a veteran of the North's U.N. and Geneva missions.

In the 1990s, Jang was involved in international talks on nuclear activity in North Korea. He was the lead North Korean negotiator at missile talks with the United States in 2000.

Citing North Korean defectors, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said many North Korean diplomats covet an assignment to Indonesia because it is one of the few countries that remain friendly to the North.

Pyongyang and Jakarta first established diplomatic relations in the 1950s, when Kim Il Sung and Indonesia's first president Sukarno - the father of current head of state Megawati Sukarnoputri - were in power.

As a teenager, Megawati presented flowers to Kim and his son when they visited Indonesia in 1965, and performed a traditional dance for them at a state banquet. Two years ago, Megawati became one of the few world leaders to visit Kim Jong Il, and described their ties as "sibling-like."

The relationship remained cordial even after Sukarno was ousted, and an army general, Suharto, took over in the midst of a bloody crackdown that wiped out Indonesia's communist movement.

In the 1970s and 1980s, both nations were active in the Nonaligned Movement, which tried to elevate the status of developing nations during the Cold War.

At the Jakarta forum this week, Indonesia hopes to host meetings involving North Korea, the United States and other nations involved in the dispute over the North's suspected efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

In his book, Conboy describes past attempts by U.S intelligence to recruit North Korean diplomats in Jakarta, a more freewheeling city than communist capitals that hosted other North Korean missions.

The efforts failed. But while the Chinese and the Vietnamese have loosened up, North Korean envoys in Jakarta remain as regimented as ever.

"The North Koreans are the lone holdout," Conboy said.