Song Du-yul - Contact With North Korea

Contact With North Korea

Song made his first visit to North Korea in 1973. His desire to see the North first-hand was heavily driven the political environment at the time in West Germany, where Ostpolitik, the official policy of engagement with East Germany, was gaining traction. According to his own statements, he became a member of the North's ruling party, the Workers' Party of Korea, at that time; he claimed that this was a requirement for entering North Korea in those days. He would visit North Korea 18 more times in the following years. Though he did not travel to the South at all during this time, he continued to pay attention to political events in his homeland; he organised large-scale protests in Berlin in 1980 over the violent suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, which culminated in a 1500-person march down the Kurfürstendamm, a main avenue in Berlin. In 1982, he began teaching at the University of Münster. He met Kim Il-sung personally in 1991; in 1994, he was the only South Korean to attend Kim's funeral (though he had already taken up German citizenship the previous year).

Song attempted to make arrangements to travel to South Korea in May 2000 to attend memorial events commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Gwangju uprising. According to the North Korean-affiliated Zainichi Korean newspaper Choson Sinbo, he refused conditions placed on him by the South Korean National Intelligence Service, which included a demand that he make a written pledge to respect South Korean law; as a result, his plans to attend the memorial collapsed. In 2001, North Korean defector Hwang Jang-yop asserted that Song was actually a member of the Workers' Party of Korea's Politburo under the alias Kim Chol-su. In response, Song initiated a lawsuit against Hwang in the Seoul 16th District Court, alleging that Hwang's statements constituted libel. Song did not return to the South for this case; his lawyer An Sang-un appeared in court on his behalf. A court ruling in August 2001 recognised that Hwang's statement had no basis in fact, but denied Song's request for payment of damages; the following month, Song announced that he would not appeal the ruling, as he was satisfied with the court's affirmation that he was not Kim Chol-su.