Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Diplomacy route on North Korea (3)

The panelists at at the American Enterprise Institute heard firsthand accounts from several North Korean refugees and from a South Korean pastor who was imprisoned by China for 220 days for assisting the refugees. During his detention in a Chinese prison, Pastor Ki-Won Chun received only a piece of bread and a cup of water, once a day.

Two other panelists, like Chun, are human rights activists helping the North Korean refugees.

"How many more testimonies, heart-wrenching testimonies, heart-breaking testimonies, mind-boggling testimonies before we act, as Senator Brownback has said, in a way that is commensurate with the gravity and the nightmarish quality of what is going on in North Korea?" asked Tim Peters, an American who is the founder of a Seoul-based famine relief program, Helping Hands Korea.

Another activist, German physician Norbert Vollertsen, first went to North Korea as a volunteer doctor. For his work, the North Korean government awarded him the Friendship Medal, which gave him a rare inside look into the country.

"The military elite they are enjoying banquets and fashionable nightclubs; in contrast was the lifestyle of the ordinary people and children -- they are dying, starving," Vollertsen said.

[From an UPI article by Carolyn Ayon Lee]

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