North Korea Plays Travis King Race Card Ahead of Human Rights Grilling

Pyongyang’s announcement that wayward U.S. soldier Travis King fled to North Korea over “racial discrimination” may be a defensive play as the totalitarian state prepares to face the U.N. security council over its horrific human rights record, analysts said. 

King, a troubled army private who had served time in a South Korean jail, bolted across the north-south border during a guided tour on July 18 after failing to board a flight home to Texas where he faced possible disciplinary proceedings.

On Tuesday night, the state newswire KCNA for the first time acknowledged King was in the north’s custody — and said he had fled due to racism and mistreatment.

“Saying he was disillusioned at the unequal American society, he expressed his will to seek political asylum,” either in North Korea “or in [a] third country,” the report said.

King “confessed that he decided to come over” due to “inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination in the US army,” KCNA said.

Pyongyang habitually brings up racism in the U.S. to deflect criticism of what Human Rights Watch describes as “one of the most repressive countries in the world.” 

"North Korea will likely highlight racism in the United States and use it as a means to counter the United States' criticism of North Korea's human rights situation," Lim Eul-chul, a professor of North Korean studies at South Korea's Kyungnam University, told Reuters.

The U.N. security council is scheduled to convene Thursday over North Korea’s human rights record in a meeting called by the U.S., Japan, and Albania. 

Pyongyang’s foreign ministry criticized Washington as a "mockery of human rights and deception on the international community."

"Not content with conniving at and fostering racial discrimination, gun-related crimes, child maltreatment and forced labor rampant in its society, the U.S. has imposed unethical human rights standards on other countries and fomented internal unrest and confusion," the ministry said.

In 2018, a North Korean government report blasted the "racial discrimination and misanthropy" it said was "inherent to the social system of the U.S.," highlighting the violent white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia.