BBC – GETTY
Jong-yil described Kim Jon-Un as a rational and competent leader
The expert, Jong-yil Ra, has spent half a lifetime studying the Kim dynasty.
Appearing on BBC Newsnight, he gave his expert opinion on the rogue state.
When asked if Kim Jong-Un is mad, he replied: “No. He is a highly rational man, highly competent actually.
“If the outside world reacts to the North Korean crisis in a rational, sensible way I do not think there would be much chance of North Korea actually using weapons against other countries.
“I cannot make out what Washington is actually doing. The President is saying something and then the Secretary of State saying something else.
“Is it a strategy, is it a tactic, or is it just confusion within the administration? I do not know.”
Also appearing on the programme is Hyeonseo Lee, who escaped from North Korea when she was 17, today she lives in Seoul.
Ms Lee is not worried about North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, but Donald Trump.
North Korea hosts a lavish banquet in honour of the country’s nuclear weapons developers
Wed, September 13, 2017
A gala banquet celebrating last week’s hydrogen bomb test, which was so powerful it caused an earthquake
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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un claps during a celebration for nuclear scientists and engineers who contributed to a hydrogen bomb test, in this undated photo released by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)
She said: “Right now, Kim Jong-Un is really scared about Trump, because he cannot predict what he will do.”
When asked what Kim Jong-Un’s reaction would be if he felt threatened, Ms Lee mimed pressing a button.
The programme comes as North Korea launched yet another missile over Japan as a response to recent sanctions against the Hermit State.
Ms Lee gave an insight into life in the despotic communist regime: “Of course we have smiling and laughing, we go to school, people go to work, work in factories or whatever.
BBC
Hyeonseo Lee said she is more scared of Trump and Kim Jong-Un
“But at the same time, we grow up becoming accustomed to public executions, we have to face that people are dying in front of us.
“During the famine, we could easily see dead bodies and sometimes the bodies were not removed so the smell of decomposing flesh was everywhere.
“We have a lot of political prisoners in camps and people disappear, sometimes a whole family in the middle of the night.
She said that everything Pyongyang does is aimed at one primary audience, the United States of America.
BBC
South Korea is divided on how to respond to North Korea
She continued: “At school, we learned that Americans are our primary enemy.
“We were taught that Americans are not human beings because in North Korea we don’t have a word for American. We only learned ‘American bastard,’ this is the only one word.”
North Korean defectors believe the only way they can see their home country again is through regime change.
But South Korea is divided about the current US policy, some are in favour of starting a war and others want the US to withdraw entirely.
The North’s primary goal since its establishment by Kim Il-Sung in 1948 has been to drive the American military out of the Korean peninsula.