“Hye Won, Gyu Won and my wife Sin Suk Ja. I am working before the world to find you all. Until the day we embrace together and confirm the victory of human dignity, I will live on.”
Such were the words sent out this morning by Oh Kil Nam, a retired South Korean economist enticed into defecting to North Korea in December 1985 and who, so as to escape shortly thereafter, had to leave his wife and daughters behind.
Doctor Oh, Charles Jenkins and defectors born in North Korean prison camps were just some of the people appearing at the morning session of a new conference on North Korean human rights in Tokyo today to commemorate the launching of a new international coalition on the subject, ICNK.
Speaking about Oh’s story at the event, Kim Tae Jin, a former inmate of Camp No. 15, Yoduk and current head of Free the NK Gulag recalled, “There was a woman who brought a waffle making implement into the prison camp. I met Doctor Oh and told him that story, and he said it must have been his wife.”
“The staple food in the prison camp was corn flour, but Mrs. Sin mixed corn flour and made waffles for us, so I remember eating really well,” Kim went on, finding joy in the pain of remembering camp life.
Another speaker in the morning session was Charles Jenkins, a former U.S. serviceman who defected to North Korea across the DMZ in 1965, later marrying an abducted Japanese woman called Hitomi Soga. The two left North Korea in the early 2000s.
“I was secretly listening to VOA on the radio and learned that Kim Jong Il had admitted to the abductions in a meeting with former Prime Minister Koizumi,” Jenkins explained, referring to the North Korea-Japan summit of 2002. “I remember telling my wife at the time, ‘Now it seems we might soon be able to go back to Japan.’”
Although Jenkins’ wife and other victims of abduction were indeed able to return home in 2002, he added that there are others still in North Korea.
Following these and other tales of suffering under the rule of the Kim family, this afternoon sees two further conference sessions on legal and political approaches to addressing North Korea’s crimes against humanity.
