SEOUL, South Korea — He was the intellectual force behind the philosophy of self-reliance that guided North Korea and was once a top official in the Workers’ Party that still rules the communist nation.
He graduated from the elite university named for North Korean founder Kim Il-Sung and was personally close to Kim himself. He tutored Kim’s son, Kim Jong-Il, who rose to become the leader of the isolated state.
Then, in 1997, during a visit to China, Hwang Jang-Yop sought asylum with South Korea — triggering a five- week diplomatic standoff and earning him scorn from the regime back home in North Korea and the epithet “human scum” in its media.
Safely in South Korea, he spoke about the danger posed not just to the Korean peninsula but to the world by the dictatorship in the North and said trying to persuade the North to give up its nuclear ambition was hopeless so long as Kim was in power.
Hwang’s naked body was found Sunday morning in a bathtub at his home in Seoul, the South Korean capital, police said. Foul play was not initially suspected, but an autopsy was planned. Hwang was 87.
Since his defection, Hwang had lived in Seoul under tight police security amid fears that North Korean agents might try to take revenge. He wrote books and delivered speeches condemning Kim’s government.
Two North Korean army majors were sentenced to prison in South Korea in July for plotting to assassinate him. North Korea has denied the plot, accusing South Korea of staging it to intensify sentiment against the North.
South Koreans hailed Hwang’s defection as an intelligence bonanza and one of the clearest signs that North Korea’s half-century experiment with communism had failed and that its political and economic systems were inferior to their own.
Hwang was skeptical about international efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear programs as long as Kim Jong-Il remained in power.
“It is nonsense to urge the North to abandon its nuclear weapons with Kim in place,” he told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview in Seoul just days after the North had carried out its first underground nuclear test.
Hwang had a wife, two sons and a daughter in North Korea before his defection. It is not known what became of them.
