N. Korea human rights need global attention

By Anna Kook

As tensions escalate on the Korean Peninsula and headlines trumpet North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests, the dire everyday lives of North Koreans and human rights issues there often are overlooked.

“Because pictures of the true average conditions in North Korea are not accessible, the international community shares a responsibility,” South Korea’s Ambassador for Human Rights in North Korea Lee Jung-hoon said recently. But the responsibility is to nevertheless learn the humanitarian truth about North Korea based on the knowledge of experts and refugees, he said.

Lee and North Korean defector Yosep Paek were sharing their expertise on North Korea with Cornell University students in New York on April 28.

The Cornell student organization debuNK _ which strives to raise awareness of North Korean human rights issues _ invited the pair to speak. While Lee stressed the dangerous political and humanitarian situation in the North, Paek shared his personal tale of fleeing for freedom.

Lee detailed North Korea’s crumbling domestic state. “It is a country whose economy collapsed a long time ago,” he said. “People are suffering from hunger and famine and yet the government is developing weapons of mass destruction and the international community must interject.”

Lee pointed out that North Korea recently released a propaganda video about “preparing for World War III” against the United States and that U.S. President Donald Trump has been treating North Korea as a serious military threat.

“Strategic patience is over,” he said. “This has been said over and over by the President, the Secretary of State, the Vice President, and the Secretary of Defense. Today marks the 100th day of the Trump presidency. Only yesterday, President Trump invited every single member of the Senate to the White House for a detailed briefing on North Korea. That’s pretty unusual.”

Lee said North Korea is “armed to the teeth” with not only “nuclear weapons but chemical weapons and biological weapons,” part of the reason why the world can no longer view the North as innocuous.

But most importantly, Lee said North Korea continues to commit crimes against humanity that cannot be ignored.

“North Korea is violating every single article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” he said. “I’m trying to encourage the defectors to pull together and coordinate their efforts to fight. Just like the North Korean nuclear issue, it’s not going away. It really is going to take a monumental effort to make a difference.”

Paek, now a journalist, shared his personal accounts of human rights violations he witnessed as a North Korean citizen and soldier in Pyongyang.

He began by making the audience laugh. “It really does feel weird to be standing here,” he said. “I have been trained all my life to kill you _ you are all my enemy.”

Paek described the appalling, inhumane conditions he experienced as a soldier posted to the border between North and South Korea.

“I was only 41 kilograms when I was first in the military,” he said. “When I left after two years, I was 31 kilograms. I ate anything I could to survive, including mice, snakes, raccoons, frogs.”

Paek said the international community has the wrong impression that sending financial support can ease the people’s destitution.

“Between 1998 and 2008, the international community donated a lot of money to North Korea,” he said. “Interestingly enough, the more money that was sent in, the more people died.”

After escaping and getting caught several times, Paek fled across six countries over six years, finally to reach freedom in South Korea. Why did he risk his life? Why did he refuse to give up?

“I suffered through all of this simply so that I could have what all of you were born with _ freedom,” Paek said. “I asked myself ‘why?’ everyday. Why did I have to be born in North Korea?”

Paek’s stirring and emotional account of the atrocities he suffered left the audience in silence.

During the question-and-answer session that followed, students bombarded the speakers with questions about Moon Jae-in, who has become South Korea’s new President. In response, Paek firmly stated, “A lot of North Korean defectors are planning to move to the United States or Canada if Moon becomes president. For us, working under Moon is like the Jews joining hands with Nazi Germany.”

Anna Kook graduated from Cornell University. She can be reached at hk678@cornell.edu.