North Korea: The World's Greatest Human Rights Tragedy Can No Longer Be Ignored
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"North Korea: The World's Greatest Human Rights Tragedy Can No Longer Be Ignored" Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today about what I believe is the worst human rights tragedy occurring in the world today. I do not intend to minimize the terrible atrocities being committed against innocent people around the world in Darfur, Zimbabwe, Burma, Tibet, and too many other places, but the situation in North Korea stands a part by the fact that the atrocities have been occurring for decades and by the sheer number of deaths -- millions and millions of innocent people have died in North Korea. To put this in perspective: in Darfur, the international criminal court issued an arrest warrant in March 2009 for Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur -- He was accused of killing an estimated 300,000 people and causing the displacement of 2.7 million people. BUT in North Korea 3 MILLION have been KILLED - just from the famine alone. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugage is accused of killing 163 people and torturing 5000, but Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-il have tortured and detained hundreds of thousands of North Korean men women and children in their political prison camp China jails 200 Tibetans and the Burma military junta jails nearly 2000 political prisoners but there are 200,000 North Koreans in political prison camps In Burma the Military Junta has not allowed the International Red Cross to visit political prisons since 2005, but the International Red Cross has NEVER visited a political prison in North Korea. When the allies liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1945, the world was shocked at the atrocities that had been committed against the Jewish people. At the time the world vowed NEVER AGAIN. NEVER AGAIN will the world stand by in silence and allow this type of cruelty occur. Yet, today, NEVER AGAIN rings hollow because what is happening to the North Korean people is a genocide, a holocaust. It is a genocide because people are being exterminated because of their classificiation of being disloyal to the regime. Whole areas of North Korea were barred from receiving humanitarian aid because Kim Jong il considered them hostile or wavering in loyalty to his regime. It is a holocaust because millions and millions of innocent people have been killed. As Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, has said: When we do not speak out on this issue, it suggest acquiesence. Our Silence is acquiesence. Our silence is death for North Koreans. Unlike Darfur, you cannot go freely to North Korea to see the situation first hand -- we have satellite photos of the political prison camps;we have eyewitnesses, survivors of these camps; but we have no ability to visit these camps to report on the atrocities. Even North Korean citizens are barred from knowing the location of these political prison camps. Furthermore, there is no ability to travel freely inside North Korea to see the starvation and there is a restricted ability even to try to report on the horrendous conditions facing the refugees that have fled to China. The refugee situation is precisely what the two American reporters, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were trying to report about and tell the world: especially the plight of North Korean women, who are trafficked in China when they seek some way to help their starving children in North Korea. You know what happened to these two American reporters -- the North Korean security agents abducted them from China and held them in Pyongyang until they were released just a short time ago. Fortunately, some brave journalists with Chosun Ilbo were able to report onthis situationand produced a documentary ON THE BORDER which recounts the human trafficking, the plight of the refugees,and North Korea's involvment in the sale and distribution of illegal drugs. Another challenge we face is that there are no dissidents in North Korea -- no Solzhenitsyn, no Vaclev Havel, no Lech Walesa, no Aung San Su Kyi to advocate for the North Korean people because the repression in the country is beyond anything we have seen and most distriburbing and troubling has been the past actions of both the South Korean and the US government to make these human rights concerns secondary to the nuclear issue. They have fallen in to the trap that Kim Jong-il set for them: with threats and tests of nuclear missiles Kim Jong-il has kept the agenda precisely where he wants it:on the nuclear issue During the Presidency of Bill Clinton(1992-2000), the United States adopted a policy of downplaying human rights violations in North Korea because the Clinton administration wanted to negotiate with Kim Jong-il over his nuclear weapons program. With the death of Kim Il Sung and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opportunity seemed great to negotiate an agreement that would open up relations with North Korea and secure a nuclear deal that would bring about stability. The Clinton administration hoped that by resolving the nuclear issue, they could then focus on the human rights issues. During the Presidency of Kim Dae Jung (1998-2003), South Korea adopted the “Sunshine policy,” hoping that by lowering the rhetoric and the antagonism between North and South, trust and reconciliation could begin. This policy guaranteed tremendous financial benefits for North Korea and was continued by South Korea’s next president Roh Moo Hyun as an Engagement Policy. This policy not only downplayed human rights concerns, it called for the complete and intentional abandonment of the human rights concerns, the abandonment of the South Koreans who have been abducted, and the Korean War POWs still being held by this regime. Government broadcasts of information and outreach programs to educate the North Korean people were cancelled completely and systematically banned in the name of peace and unity. The flow of information reported by the government and the media to make South Koreans aware of the horrors occurring in the North was stopped. Even the high ranking North Korean defectors working on research for the South Korean government were threatened and forced into silence. These policies were cast as noble and admirable. Who could oppose a deal that would stop North Korea’s nuclear program? Who could oppose a policy of “sunshine”? However, South Koreans and the world were deceived, because “Sunshine” was only for the dictator, NOT for the North Korean people. Engagement was appeasement of Kim Jong-il, NOT a two-way dialogue that would lead to reforms that could benefit the people of North Korea. When President George Bush was elected in 2000, he put the Clinton policy towards North Korea on hold and ordered a top to bottom review of how the United States should deal with North Korea. Bush claimed that Kim Jong-il was a dictator arming himself with nuclear weapons while starving his own people. No one appreciated Bush’s candor more than the North Korean defectors who felt that was an accurate summary of the situation. But Bush instead decided to downplay the human rights issues during the 6 Party Talks. He even had the US government become a money launderer for Kim Jong-il when they used the US Federal Reserve to return to Kim Jong-il the $25 million that had been frozen in the Banco Delta Asia account that had come from Kim Jong-il's illegal activities. During all these years of non-proliferation treaties, the Agreed Framework, the Sunshine Policy, the Engagement Policy, and the 6 Party Talks, millions of North Koreans have died. Actually, died is the wrong word because it suggests they simply passed away. They were in fact starved to death, worked to death, tortured and beaten to death, publicly executed, by the very deliberate and very intentional policies of Kim Jong-il. I do not know what it is like to go hungry but I understand it is a very painful way to die. In the thirteen years that I have been involved in this issue, I have met so many North Korean defectors who have lost fathers, mothers, grandparents, siblings, and children from starvation. All of their deaths totally the responsibility of Kim Jong-il. While we have ignored these human rights issues during our talks, we have fooled ourselves in to believing that Kim Jong-il would agree to give up his nuclear ambitions. The truth is that Kim Jong-il will never give up his nuclear weapons because they are the only things he has left to maintain power. He has brilliantly manipulated the good will of free people to strengthen his grip on power, and continue his enslavement of the people of North Korea. And, we have helped him not only financially but by being silent about his atrocities. Our silence means death to the people of North Korea. Kim Jong-il, while among the most evil dictators in modern history, is also brilliant at manipulating the good will of free nations. While we attempted to feed the starving North Korean people, he continued to convince them that we wanted to destroy them, that we were their mortal enemy. When we don’t even mention the suffering that the North Korean people are facing, we prove Kim Jong-il’s lies to be true: all we care about is the nuclear issue, that South Korea and the United States do not care about the North Korean people, only the harm they could potentially do to us. You may wonder how a dictator can maintain power in the face of so much death and despair. From its very foundation by Kim Il Sung, the citizens of the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea were classified into three main classes with 51 subcategories: core class, wavering, and hostile and these classifications are forever. Forever you are in this classification system and this classification determines where you and your family live, where you go to school, what your job will be. There are no independent sources of information -- only government propaganda. There is no freedom to travel, no ability to read newspapers other than the government issued propaganda. Those of us growing up in free societies learn to appreciate other cultures and respect others beliefs. I am sure that all of your parents raised you with an appreciation for other cultures and for learning or you would not be at this university. But in North Korea children are taught from childhood not only to worship the dear leader, Kim Jong-il but to hate and fear other cultures, especially Americans. For example, a math text book in North Korea teaches addition by citing an equation such as: If you threw a grenade and killed two American GIs, and your friend threw a grenade and killed three American GIs, how many American GIs would you and your friend have killed? This brainwashing is so great that last year a defector we planned to visit the USA was afraid to come. AN Jin Hee was invited to be a special witness during North Korea Freedom Week, an annual event we host to promote the freedom, human rights and dignity of the North Korean people. She was invited as a special witness, as she was the only known survivor of the North Korean Christian underground church. It is a miracle that she avoided execution for the crime of being a Christian, and was given leniency – a simple 15 year sentence of torture and hard labor instead of death by public execution. She survived three years of torture until her husband got enough money to pay a bribe to get her temporarily released, so she could regain her health, and be returned to the political prison camp to be tortured again. Instead, she escaped and made it to freedom in South Korea, but she was still terrified to come to the United States for North Korea Freedom Week. Despite living in freedom in South Korea, she was still afraid of Americans and she actually prayed with her prayer group that she would not be killed by coming to America. That is a testament to the power of the brainwashing done by the Kim Jong-il regime. But her decision to come to the United States, is also a testament, a testament to the power of the human spirit. She decided that she would go to the United States to speak out for the suffering people of North Korea even though she believed she could lose her life for doing this. Of course, she fell in love with America and the American people embraced her as well. She wrote to me after the visit: “During North Korea Freedom Week, I experienced so much love and sincerity, my heart overflows with emotion. Until today I cried because my heart was so hurt, so bruised, but now I cry with joy and I cannot stop thinking about what I can do to bring freedom and human rights to my fellow North Koreans.” I used to think that North Koreans had at least one human right:the right to die. But then I met Young Kuk Lee who had been a bodyguard for Kim Jong-il. He was arrested and tortured because he complained about the famine like conditions in North Korea. He was tortured so severely that he wanted to die but he tells us that the prison guards kept him alive just to prolong his agony. The death toll in North Korea: a minimum of 3 million have died of starvation -- none of these deaths needed to occur if Kim Jong-il had alllowed for the distribution of food aid -- the famine never would have occurred if Kim Jong-il had adopted agriculatural reform; and when international food aid arrived to save the starving North Korean people, he used it as a weapon: cutting off whole sections of the country from aid because he deemed them disloyal. Another method Kim Jong-il uses to conrol the North Korean people is FEAR. Fear of being sent to a political prison camp where already at least 400,000 to one million have died. Today, 42 people will die in the political prison camps and 391 will die from hunger and lack of medical care. The political prison camps instill a terrible fear among the people -- whole families are sent to these camps if just one person is accused of a crime -- crimes include listening to a foreign radio broadcast, not properly showing respect to Kim Jong-il, complaining about government policy, converting to Christianity. When one family member is accused of a crime, the entire family through three generations is sent to the political prison camps. Thus the camps include elderly and children. And even children are born in these camps with no hope of ever being released. Kim Young Soon was a dancer who was sent to political prison camps along with her parents and children, and her husband. She had no idea what crime she had committed. She has no idea what happened to her husband, but she watched her parents die in these camps, and her son was shot for trying to escape. These camps are death camps where people are beaten arbitraily, forced to work from 5:30 am until 8 pm; given barely enough food to survive, and subjected to the most unsanitary living conditions. Now because of the famine in the 1990s, many North Koreans started to cross the border into China for food and work. The regime warned the North Korean people not to go to China because China was experiencing Civil War and even though things might be bad in North Korea, they were much worse in China. Well, North Koreans crossed the border anyway despite the warnings and what did they find? Rather than treat these starving North Koreans humanely the Chinese regime made an agreement with North Korea to force North Koreans back to North Korea. Under international law, the moment a North Korean defector crosses the border they meet the definition of an asylum seeker because it is a criminal offense, punishable by death, for a North Korean to leave their country without permission. China is obligated not to repatriate the refugees because it is a signatory to the 1951 U.N. Convention on Refugees and its 1969 Protocol, but it continues to force them back to North Korea. Every North Korean who is forced back to North Korea by China is tortured and imprisoned, and those who are found to have crossed more than once, or been in contact with Christians, can be publicly executed. Furthermore, China established a policy to fine and jail their own citizens as well as humanitarian workers who provide food and shelter to the refugees. American businessman Steve Kim of Huntington New York was jailed for four years because he was caught rescuing North Koreans. The two Chinese citizens who were working with him were given two year sentences for buying tickets and giving rides to these refugees. By refusing to abide by its international agreements and jailing humanitarians who try to help North Korean refugees, China is directly responsible for creating a horrific human rights crisis: Over 80% of North Korean females have become victims of trafficking, while men are treated as slave laborers. Mrs. KIM Young Ae’s husband died in an accident when she, her son and parents were already at the brink of starvation. Lured to China by a trafficker who promised her a job as a nanny, she crossed the Yalu River, only to be met on the other side by a trafficker who took her to Lianoning Province to be sold to a mentally unstable Chinese pig farmer for (5000 yuan) $733. According to Mrs. Kim, “I had to live a life of hell, for he threatened that he would hand me over to the Chinese police if I said or did anything that displeased him.” Mrs. Kim suffered through terrible misery until she finally was able to escape to South Korea in 2007. Mrs. BANG Mi Sun’s husband starved to death during the famine. Afraid that the rest of her family might starve, she and her son and daughter crossed the Tumen River in June, 2002. She said, “I thought I would be able to feed my children once I got to China, but what was really waiting for us was the possibility of arrest and forced return to North Korea by the Chinese police. Just as I was ready to do anything that would guarantee my children’s safety, a Chinese trafficker appeared and began to threaten me using my children’s vulnerability. In the end, I was sold for (4,000 yuan) $586, and taken to a place called Hualong. The Chinese brokers called us North Korean women ‘pigs’.” During her time as a refugee in China, Mrs. Bahng was sold three times. There were many North Korean woman with Mrs. Bang and she was sold first as “the best pig.” The person who bought her then sold her to his relative in Shandong. Her new husband was 15 years her senior and treated her as a beast of burden constantly stressing how he had bought her for the enormous sum of (7000 yuan) $1025. While the man who bought her was out of the house, a group of people stormed in and took her to be sold again. In addition to the traffickers, there are also vicious brokers who steal North Korean women only to resell them. This time she was sold to a man over 10 years younger than she – he was 34 and she was 48 – and he demanded that she bear him a child. When he found out that she had a contraceptive device, he brought in an obstetrician and had the members of his family hold her down while the obstetrician brutally tore the contraceptive device out of her body. This caused her to be bedridden for a month. After she regained her health, she fled with the hope of finding her children but she was arrested by the Chinese police and forced back to North Korea. North Korean security agents sent her to a labor camp in Musan, where she was forced to do intensive physical activity. When she fell in exhaustion, they beat her with a bludgeon on her leg permanently disabling her. All of this happened to her simply because she wanted to feed her children. The stories of these two women are typical of what is happening right now in China and right now North Koreans are facing a tragedy the seems to never end: starvation in North Korea leading them to flee to China, abuse and inhumane treatment in China, and then punishment and torture when China forces them back to North Korea. How can Hu Jintao continue to placate Kim Jong-il with this repatriation policy?Today, a high ranking delegation from China is currently visiting North Korea to shore up their close relationship.. But, how can China continue to placate Kim Jong-il who has shown his racist contempt for the Chinese people by ordering his border guards to force North Korean women who have been repatriated from China and found to be pregnant to abort their babies because they are "half-Chinese." I believe that the Chinese Government has an unfounded fear that if China showed compassion to the refugees China would be flooded with refugees which could lead to the collapse of the North Korean regime. But If fleeing refugees could lead to the collapse of the regime, it would have happened by now. After 500,000 crossed the border and 3 million people died, Kim Jong-il’s grip on power never faltered. This fear is not only unfounded, but is prolonging the suffering. Refugees are leaving Kim Jong-il, not North Korea, because they are hungry and repressed. Nearly every defector I have met in working on this issue for 13 years has told me they want to go back to North Korea once conditions improve in North Korea. If China allowed refugees safe passage, this would create pressure on Kim Jong-il to reform, something that is also in China’s best interest. When reform comes to North Korea, conditions will improve and China will no longer have to deal with this refugee problem. Furthermore, the North Korean refugee crisis is unlike any refugee crisis in the world because in this case these refugees have a place to go:they are citizens of South Korea under the South Korean constitution. There is no reason for the government of China to continue this barbaric and inhumane policy. Now is an especially urgent time to focus on the North Korean human rights issues because things are dramatically changing in North Korea and the death of Kim Jong-il is imminent. The public distribution system in which the regime distributed food and material goods is completely broken down. Only in Pyongyang is there regular distribution of food and even that distribution is not enough to survive. This system which made the entire population dependent on Kim Jong-il has given way to an explosion of private markets throughout North Korea to such an extent that the majority of the population now survives on these markets to get by. One could argue that capitalism is alive and well and thriving in North Korea as the people cope the best they can with trading and selling in the markets. Attempts by the regime to shut down these markets has repeatedly failed. Furthermore, another powerful tool of Kim Jong-il to maintain control is also gone ---isolation. His ability to cut the North Korean people off from the rest of the world is no longer possible. Decades of propaganda which convinced the North Korean people that they were the most advanced nation, lived in a wonderful paradise, and were far better off than their South Korean neighbor is unraveling as information is getting into North Korea. More and more North Koreans are listening to foreign radio broadcasts risking the chance that they could be arrested and sent to a political prison camp. Futhermore, when DVDs became the new video technology, thousands and thousands of VCRs were dumped into the North Korean market by savvy Chinese businessmen -- about the only place where these VCRs could have had a market. As a result, North Koreans began watching South Korean soap operas and western films and soon came to realize that the regime had been telling them many lies and distortions about South Korea and the rest of the world. In fact, the film TITANIC became so widely watched in North Korea that the regime felt compelled to inform the people that the movie was a depiction of the failure of capitalism -- the great ship, Titanic sinking being the symbol of capitalism's failure. Furthermore, 16,500 North Korean defectors are now residing in South Korean any many have been able to communicate with their family members back in Korea providing yet another source of information about the outside world. This growing knowledge and awareness inside North Korea makes it even more critical that we raise these human rights issues so that the North Koreans know that our concerns are for them. If we fail to speak out we betray our values as a free people, we embolden Kim Jongil's regime, and we make it impossible for the double-thinkers, those who know that Kim Jong-il must go, to ever rise up against him. We know these thinkers exist because they are escaping North Korea all the time. Among the sixteen thousand defectors who have escaped to South Korea are military leaders, diplomats, National Security Bureau agents, teachers, professors – members of the elite, as well as the hostile and wavering classes. And 500,000 have shown their dissent by the very act of crossing the North Korea/China border. But how can those leaders in North Korea who want reform and change ever find their voice if ours is silent in the face of their suffering? Through speaking the truth and promoting human rights, and working to empower the North Korean defectors, we can end the suffering of the North Korean people peacefully. Just a few examples of the many defectors actively working for human rights who need your support include: Kim Seung Min, the director of Free North Korea Radio, and his staff are broadcasting every day factual information into North Korea. There is nothing more powerful than North Korean defectors living in freedom talking to North Koreans living in enslavement. Park Sang Hak, the head of the Fighters for Free North Korea, is sending balloons into North Korean carrying pamphlets with true historical facts and true information. North Korean officials have actually brought these pamphlets to talks with South Korea demanding that this be stopped, which shows the regime is feeling the impact of truth coming into the darkness. Kang Su-Jin, the leader of North Korean Women’s Solidarity for Human Rights, is working to uphold the dignity of North Korean women and restore their God-given sense of worth as so many have been demeaned in North Korea and experienced unspeakable horrors as refugees in China. Jung Sung San, the Yoduk Story director, is producing theatrical productions to expose the realities of North Korea in popular culture. I believe he is the Harriet Beecher Stowe of Korea, and just like Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin depicted the horrors of slavery in America, Jung is revealing the horrors of the enslavement of the North Korean people. Kim Young-il and Joo Seung-il are two young North Korean defectors who have established organizations for young people. Kim's group works with South Korean students while Joo's group is uniting the hundreds of North Korean defectors who are attending college. Pastor Kang Chul Ho is leading a North Korean defector church in Seoul. He works to help the members of his congregation rebuild their lives, become productive citizens, and restore their hopes and dreams that were nearly destroyed by Kim Jong-il. He understands the spiritual battle we are facing in confronting the darkness that is North Korea. All these defectors are working hard to help those North Koreas living here now in South Korea while also preparing and working towards that day when North Korea is free. (END) |
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