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The Korea Club in Washington, D.C., hosted a special presentation Nov. 14, by Jack Rendler, who is a country specialist for North Korea at the Amnesty International U.S.
The club includes the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the Korea Economic Institute of America, both located in Washington, D.C. Rendler has been a human rights activist since 1978, and currently volunteers as the Amnesty country coordinator on North Korea.
According to Rendler, people in North Korea are deprived of their civil and political rights. They cannot meet, talk or move freely within their own country. Further, political prisoners are treated worse than common criminals. Not only disloyalty, but perceived disloyalty is enough to be arrested as a political prisoner.
We do not even know how many political prisoners are now in prisons or reform camps. We know that guards of political prisons are trained to torture, with some prisoners simply disappearing from prison. Political prisoners are often worked to death, starved to death and tortured to death.
Approximately one in every 25 to 30 North Koreans is an informer for internal security, with rewards in shelter, food and better educational opportunities for their children. In North Korea, even hairstyles are controlled.
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Importantly, violation of human rights in North Korea is so rampant that the entire 25 million people in North Korea are practically living in custody.
When leaders in North Korea are cruel enough to treat all their people as though they're in custody, there is a danger that the same leaders may not hesitate to use nuclear bombs if these bombs help achieving their objective of unifying the two Koreas under their control.
Oppressed life in North Korea continues to the third generation, making any substantive improvement in the thinking process of North Koreans a long-term project.
Even North Korean refugees who live in South Korea are having a tough time adjusting. This calls for truly compassionate assistance by the government toward these refugees living in South Korea.
In Rendler's own words, "To casual observers it may appear that nothing has changed in the landscape of North Korean human rights for a very long time. Looking more closely, there is ample reason to believe that increasing numbers of North Koreans are able to see, think and believe more independently than ever before."
Efforts of Amnesty International contributed to improvement; so did digital technology in smuggling of CDs and USBs that contain South Korean dramas into North Korea.
When the presentation ended and I was leaving the room, it dawned on me that unification would not likely be successful without, first, winning the hearts and minds of ordinary people in North Korea.
If South Korea is just as cruel as North Korea by sending North Korean refugees back to the North with no due process, what incentives will be there for North Korean people to want unification?
It may well be a waste of time, if any political progress is attempted at the expense of human rights of individual North Koreans and North Korean refugees living in South Korea. It will not be easy but I feel that making people in North Korea desire unification may have to come concurrently with, if not before, the current policy of pleasing brutal leaders of North Korea.
Chang Se-moon (changsemoon@yahoo.com) is the director of the Gulf Coast Center for Impact Studies.
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