I can tell you Thailand and North Korea generally have excellent diplomatic relations. The two keep embassies in each other’s capital. North Korea buys A LOT of rice from Thailand, but I understand there’s a huge outstanding bill at the moment that is a sticking point.
The good diplomatic relations make it tricky when defectors show up here. Many do after travelling overland through China and Laos. Many get nabbed up North in Chiang Rai province, which borders Laos. The wife and I have personally witnessed a group of five or six non-Thai Asians, who looked suspiciously Korean, get pulled off a bus we were on in Chiang Saen district of that province when they could produce no documents at a checkpoint and could not speak Thai OR English. A Thai-speaking lady was accompanying them, but her story that they were a group of tourists out for the day didn’t wash. She was clearly their local handler. This was in September 2006; I remember the month and year because I was playing in the elephant-polo tournament there at that time. (This was before my shoulder problems.) That particular district is a major crossing point for North Korean refugees, and for a small backwater it has an unusual number of Korean restaurants. And whenever a North Korean gets popped, somehow a local resident Korean or a legal representative finds out about it immediately and shows up at the police station to do what he can.
Occasionally, there will be raids in Bangkok, with dozens or even scores of North Korean defectors nabbed inside a single house or a cluster of houses. These are usually found in neighborhoods with a high concentration of Korean residents. Wanting to maintain good relations with North Korea, they always publicize these round-ups, but as far as I know, none has ever been rapatriated to North Korea. Instead, they’re all eventually, and queitly, allowed to settle in third countries via the UNHCR. But while in detention, they’re held in deplorable conditions; maybe that makes North Koea happy? And occasionally, groups of North Korean defectors will rush into the South Korean or Japanese Embassy to demand asylum. You can see something on North Korean asylum-seekers in Thailand here.
Ten years ago there was an odd incident involving a North Korean diplomat and his family. He, his wife and 20-year-old son lived outside the embassy compound in an apartment here in Bangkok. The embassy somehow got wind of the fact that they were planning to defect and so kidnapped them from their apartment! They tried spiriting them away overland to the the Lao capital of Vientiane, which is just across the Mekong River from our Nong Khai province. Presumably, the plan was to fly them back to Pyongyang from Vientiane.
I say “presumably” because their plan was foiled when one of the cars in the convoy blew a tire on the highway to the border and crashed. The family was rescued by Thai authorities. North Korea tried to say the diplomat had embezzled tens of millions of US dollars that had been earmarked for the outstanding rice bill, and that was why he and his family were being “recalled.” Then a bizarre twist: The 20-year-old son denounced his parents, who he said was forcing him to defect against his will. The last I heard, the parents did settle in the West, and the son is back in North Korea.
You can see something about the aftermath of this incident here.
