Hwang Jang-yop, a top North Korean ideologue who defected to South Korea 13 years ago and died here earlier this week, was laid to rest Thursday at the National Cemetery in Daejeon, south of Seoul.

His funeral, held at Asan Medical Center in Seoul earlier in the day, was attended by about 300 people, including former President Kim Young-sam, Unification Minister Hyun In-taek, leaders of the ruling Grand National Party and his fellow exiles.

“It is with great sorrow to have to let him go when North Korea’s totalitarian regime, which has made its 23 million people slaves, is still intact and is now even attempting a hereditary dynastic succession for three generations,” Park Gwan-yong, a former speaker of South Korea’s National Assembly, said in his funeral address.

Hwang, before he defected to Seoul via Beijing in 1997, was the chief ideologue of communist North Korea, having crafted North Korea’s isolationist state policy of Juche. He also held ranking positions in the communist country, such as secretary of its ruling Workers’ Party in charge of foreign affairs.

“His coming to South Korea itself was the severest blow to North Korea,” Park recalled.

After taking asylum here, Hwang became an acerbic critic of the North and its current leader Kim Jong-il, whom he once taught.

Hwang was found dead Sunday morning at his home in Seoul, where he lived under around-the-clock police protection against a possible attempt at retaliation by North Korea. Police said it was a natural death associated with heart failure. He was 87. 

North Korea on Thursday hurled invective at the late defector, calling his death a curse he well deserved.

“What could be a more miserable death to die away from home, with no one around,” it said in a posting titled “the fate of a traitor” in its first response to Hwang’s death. It was Pyongyang’s first response to the death of Hwang.

South Korea’s conservative government did much to posthumously honor him, praising him as a courageous man who risked his life to reveal the truth about North Korea’s totalitarian regime.

It conferred on him a top-class medal of honor and offered him a spot in one of its national cemeteries where Korean War dead and patriotic leaders are buried.

His death also revealed the wide ideological divide in South Korea over the North Korean issue.

Most left-leaning politicians were absent from the funeral. Leaders of left-wing opposition groups ― the Democratic Party, the Democratic Labor Party and the New Progressive Party ― did not send a delegation, unlike the conservative ruling GNP and right-wing opposition Liberty Forward Party.

Chung Sye-kyun, a former leader of the main opposition DP who served as a Cabinet member under former leftist President Roh Moo-hyun, criticized the conservative government for playing up Hwang’s death to justify its hard-line stance on North Korea.

“Hwang, a chief theoretician behind North Korea’s guiding ideology, was among those responsible for what North Korea is now. In his exile in South Korea, he never denied the Juche ideology,” Chung pointed out.

The late defector was also critical of leftist politicians’ engagement policy toward the North.

By Lee Sun-young (milaya@heraldcorp.com)