From despot’s PR man to Surrey salesman
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.