Kurt Achin has great trouble telling the North Korean story. In his role as English language head for Voice of America (VOA) in Seoul, Kurt has colleagues whose job it is to get news of the outside world to the people of North Korea themselves, but it is his task to try and tell everyone else about North Korea.
Speaking at the International Conference on North Korean Human Rights held by Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights (NKnet), Kurt explained that telling the human rights narrative is particularly difficult, for three reasons; first, “stories of human rights, which don’t change at a fast pace, yield to stories of security,” leading him to sometimes feel as if he is writing the same story about nuclear weapons time and time again. Second, it is easy for reporters to forget how easy it is for North Korea to “hijack the narrative” on human rights, for example on family reunions, whose scale, location and even their very existence is largely at the whim of the North; and third, the range of sources at his disposal is both small, and not always reliable.
The challenge for reporters, he says, is to get past the lies, half-truths and packaged narratives about “Evil North Korea” and, on the other hand, “Misunderstood North Korea,” neither of which is true, and neither of which is entirely false. The VOA’s aim, Achin asserts, is to be as methodical as possible in using sources, to distinguish the North Korean regime from the people it viciously represses, to refuse to let the nuclear issue “steamroll” human rights concerns, as it so easily can on the international stage, and to hold every single nation to account for how they approach the North Korean human rights problem.
Then he can say he will have done his job.
