Defector calls on European tourists and online viewers to shun cultural displays that take children out of school

The highest-ranking official to defect from North Korea has called for Europeans to stop being an audience for the “child exploitation” in the country’s famous mass games.

Thae Yong-ho, the former deputy ambassador to the UK, who defected in 2016, said travel companies and tourists should boycott the cultural displays, which attract large numbers of visitors and social media viewings. He said North Korean children already faced appalling rates of malnutrition, brainwashing and forced labour and the displays were yet another act of cruelty.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Participants perform during the ‘Glorious Country’ mass games, held in conjunction with North Korea’s 70th anniversary parade in September 2018, in Pyongyang. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP

Thae had earlier told the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway: “Every year North Korea gives this mass gymnastic display. You should know that it means the children, aged from six to nine, cannot go to school for six months – it’s a forced exercise. And who are the audience for this? Europeans, and there are many European tour companies who organise trips. We should argue this with the European companies – these are inhumane displays.”

The games, which involve up to 10,000 participants and run nightly for two months in the Pyongyang May Day stadium, resumed last year after a five-year hiatus.

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Thae said he had defected when he returned to North Korea after his diplomatic stint in the UK and realised his two sons had to hide the truth of every part of their lives in London from their friends. “I told them, read Oliver Twist – one of the few books that are allowed by the Kim regime – and describe what is there. Not the internet, not YouTube, not their schools or friends.”

The 56-year-old, who was labelled “human scum” by the North Korean government when he fled with his family, said he had seen many friends and colleagues simply disappear, presumably taken to the dreaded prison camps.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Thae Yong-ho, left, with American scholar Robert Kelley at the Oslo Freedom Forum. Photograph: Julia Reinhart/Getty Images

The torture camps and the “infrastructure of fear” effectively dampened any resistance, keeping the people “asleep”, said Thae, a process to which the brainwashing of nursery-age children – who are taught to bow to the portrait of Kim Jong-un – contributed.

Talking of having to see his son forced to work 15-hour days in rice fields during school holidays alongside his classmates, he said children were regularly used as “slave labour” and predicted it would be at least another decade before North Koreans began any real show of dissent that might topple the dictator Kim.

The next mass games is due to be held in the autumn.

Thae said the rate of malnutrition in North Korea was a huge concern, causing widespread stunting – a condition caused by being starved of nutrients as a baby – among much of the population.

“This is the only country in the world where the height of the population is getting smaller and smaller,” he said. “North and South used to be the same nation, the same culture, the same. Now it’s different, the people are a good 10 to 15cm or more smaller. It is very noticeable. This is the effect of malnutrition. This is starving the people.”