North Korea: American expats and NGOs in S. Korea appeal to President Obama

Excerpts of a letter to President Obama from Timothy Peters, Founder/Director of Helping Hands Korea:

Mr. President, we continue to grieve over the extraordinary human rights violations suffered by the North Korean people, including a prison system that begs comparison to the gulags perpetrated by Josef Stalin and the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. This is not an abstraction nor hyperbole; more than 20 survivors of the gulag system have made their way to freedom to tell their heart‐rending accounts of prisons in the North. Accounts of three generations of family punishment for judicial sentences that never saw the light of a courtroom abound. Human experimentation of biological and poison gas agents are at times carried out on prisoners who have dared to embrace the Christian faith or express the slightest criticism of the all‐powerful Kim Jong‐il family regime.

Some North Korean citizens, as you know, flee out of desperation to neighboring China to escape the suffocating vacuum of human rights even in the ordinary society of their native land. China, although a signatory of the 1951 Convention for the Protection of Refugees, has for the past 13 years, turned a blind eye to the obligations of this international human rights instrument. By systematically repatriating North Korean refugees to the DPRK government security apparatus, China continues to subject innocent men, women and even children to harsh interrogation, torture, extended imprisonment. In the cases of some trafficked refugee women who are pregnant with children fathered by Chinese men, we hear a drumbeat of testimonies to the horrific nightmare of forced abortion.

How such barbaric practices could continue year after year without a profound challenge from the United States America, not to mention other mature democracies of the world, is simply beyond belief. By ‘profound challenge,’ we do not mean mere speeches, or resolutions or special envoys, but decisions at the highest level of government that indicate that our cherished ideals of human dignity transcend our short‐term economic strategies.

Sir, in the waning months of 2004 your predecessor signed into law the North Korean Human Rights Act that had passed unanimously in the U.S. Congress in October of that year. Despite the overwhelming support for this piece of legislation and the authorization by Congress of resources for NGO’s to help the highly vulnerable North Korean refugees in China, actual inclusion of the authorized funding was never, to our knowledge, included in subsequent national budgets submitted by the George W. Bush Administration.

Given the extraordinary plight of the North Korean refugees in particular, we cannot remotely imagine what justification could be offered for this silence and inaction in the face of an overwhelming Congressional expression of the national will to act.

Mr. President, we earnestly and respectfully encourage you, during your trip to China, to speak out in an uncompromising manner to demand that the Chinese leadership immediately halt the forcible repatriation of North Korean refugees in China.

Washington Post blasts silence about North Korean camps

Future generations will wonder why the U.S. and South Korea did nothing about human rights abuses in North Korea, the Washington Post said in an editorial comparing North Korean prison camps to concentration camps in Nazi Germany. American children "may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong-il's camps, and did nothing."

Titled "Three Kernels of Corn," the editorial recounts the torture and human rights abuse of Shin Dong-hyuk, a 26-year-old refugee and former inmate of a concentration camp. The title alludes to Shin's experience at the camp, where he found three kernels of corn in a pile of cow dung, washed them off and ate them. Shin was the first North Korean refugee who escaped from a concentration camp.

"It's horrifying, on another level, that only 500 people in South Korea, where Shin lives, have bought his book. Many Koreans don't want to hear about human rights abuses in the north; they're worried that the Communist regime might collapse and leave the more prosperous South with a costly burden of rehabilitation."

The U.S., meanwhile, is more concerned with containing North Korea's nuclear ambitions. "High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't bomb the rail lines to Hitler's camps. Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il's camps, and did nothing."

[Chosun Ilbo]