Oh Kil-nam
| Oh Kil-nam | |
| Hangul | 오길남 |
|---|---|
| Hanja | 吳吉男 |
| Revised Romanization | O Kil-nam |
| McCune–Reischauer | O Gil-nam |
Oh Kil-nam (born 1942) is a retired South Korean economist, who was offered a job as an economist in North Korea, and so defected to North Korea with his wife Shin Suk-ja and daughters, then left them behind when he obtained political asylum in Denmark, where he was working in the North Korean embassy.
Oh was born in Uiseong, Gyeongsangbuk-do, in the southern half of the Korean peninsula, and then went to Busan for high school. He graduated from Seoul National University in 1970, where he majored in German literature. After his graduation, he went to Germany to pursue graduate education in economics. In 1972, he married Shin Suk-ja, a fellow South Korean migrant in Germany. The couple had two daughters, Oh Hae-won (born 1976) and Oh Kyu-won (born 1978). He filed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Bremen in 1985, on the topic of Japanese Marxian economist Nobuo Okishio and the labour theory of value.
Oh became involved in political activism against the South Korean government in the early 1980s. He was influenced in this by a number of famous South Korean leftists in Germany, including Song Du-yul and Yun Isang; they later suggested that he could help his motherland by working as an economist in North Korea. His activism also attracted the attention of North Korean government representatives, who further attempted to entice him to defect, claiming that his wife could receive free treatment for her hepatitis in Pyongyang. Over the objections of his wife, Oh took his family to North Korea, arriving on 8 December 1985. Instead of receiving the promised medical treatment, he and his wife were held at a military camp and forced to study the Juche ideology of Kim Il-sung, then employed making propaganda broadcasts to South Korea. While there, he claims to have met South Korean abductees who were also employed making propaganda broadcasts, including two of the flight attendants from the Korean Air Lines YS-11 hijacking.
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