“We could not anticipate that North Korea could do something as crazy as not allowing our embassy staff to leave the country,” Ong said at a forum at the Malaysian Centre for Constitutionalism and Human Rights in Bangsar last night.
He said it was of utmost importance to Pyongyang to give the world the impression that the Kim regime was beyond reproach.
Commenting on the aggression shown in remarks made against Malaysian authorities by Kang Chol, the now-expelled North Korean ambassador, Ong said it showed that he had Putrajaya-Pyongyang relations furthest from his mind.
“It is about the larger propaganda,” he said. “It’s the strategy of the North Korean government to deny any possibility that the government would want to kill this half-brother of Kim Jong Un because everything is good and well in the North Korean administration and ‘we could not have this kind of thing happening in the Kim family.’”
Ong said he had first-hand experience with Kang Chol’s undiplomatic demeanour in 2015. “I have had lunch with the now-departed North Korean ambassador.”
He said Kang Chol invited him for the lunch after he had released a press statement on North Koreans employed in Sarawak mines which was picked up by South Korean and Japanese media.
“The very next day I had a call from the North Korean embassy asking me out for lunch. Fearing that I would get kidnapped, I asked one of my officers to follow me.”
He said he was taken aback by the undiplomatic language the ambassador used during the meeting.
“I brought up the issue of North Korean defectors and some of the news that has been coming out in South Korea – economic issues and famine and things like that.
“He basically said in a nutshell the North Korean defectors, the South Koreans, and the Japanese and Americans are ‘scum of the earth’. I have never heard a diplomat talk like that.”
Ong said that for him, Kang Chol’s remarks during the lunch contextualised some of the things he said in regard to the suspected murder of Kim Jong Nam.
When asked which country he thought would be able to mediate between Malaysia and North Korea, Ong said it would most likely be China.
He said Putrajaya’s main priority should be to extract Malaysian nationals from North Korea.