Park Sun-young |
By Kang Hyun-kyung
Outgoing lawmaker, Park Sun-young, plans to establish a non-profit group to help children born in North Korea brought to Seoul by their parents and former prisoners of war (POWs) when her four-year term ends in May.
A member of the minor Liberty Forward Party (LFP), Park’s project will help children of defectors, prisoners of war and ethnic Koreans who formerly lived in the northeastern part of Russia.
“Adaptation is a huge everyday problem facing children born and raised in North Korea here in South Korea. They are struggling in school partly because they were unable to have a proper education after escaping from the North with their parents,” Park said.
“Many of these children became middle- or high-school drop-outs because they fail to catch up with school coursework in the South. This is the case for college students, too. Even though they were admitted to university, many of them quit after realizing their academic performance and English skills fall far short of the standard of their South Korean classmates,” she said in a press release.
To help them, Park, 56, said, she plans to establish a school and provide North Korean children with English language programs in English-speaking countries.
The lawmaker also mentioned the plight facing former POWs.
There are approximately 60 POWs, who are in their 80s, in South Korea. “These weary, elderly citizens have no place to go and spend the rest of their lives here lonely,” Park said.
The lawmaker is now looking for those who are willing to join her project.
Park will oversee the project while teaching students at Dongguk University in Seoul. Prior to joining the National Assembly as a LFT lawmaker through the proportional representation system, Park was a professor at the university. Before this, she was a broadcast journalist for 12 years.
New members of the National Assembly are scheduled to be sworn in during June.
During the past four years, the lawmaker has come under the spotlight because of her outstanding role as a member of the foreign affairs committee.
Park was at the forefront of a campaign urging China to stop the repatriation of North Korean refugees to Pyongyang because they would suffer inhumane treatment.
In early March, she went to hospital after collapsing due to staging an 11 day hunger strike in front of the Chinese Embassy in Seoul. She started the protest to save 34 North Koreans, caught in China in February after crossing the border with the Stalinist state. The North’s closest ally has, however, turned a deaf ear to the mounting calls.
During the past four years, Park has also actively promoted the human rights of ethnic Koreans living in the far eastern part of Russia.
She is the main architect of a bill calling for repatriating tens of thousands Koreans living there after their parents or grandparents were forced to move during the Japanese colonial period that lasted from 1910 to 1945.
The bill wasn’t supported by other lawmakers because it was said to be unfeasible financially and technically.
Those who are willing to participate in her project to help North Korean children and South Korean POWs can write to her email (sy0406@na.go.kr) for details.
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