19 July 2005—WASHINGTON. The debate concerning what to do about North Korea’s nuclear arms development and Kim Jong Il’s crimes against humanity is not new to Washington, nor is it new to the Bush Administration. Since Kim Jong Il’s dictatorship came to power in 1994 following the death of his father Kim Il Sung, the U.S. government has been embroiled in conflict over Kim Jong’s blatant abrasiveness to reform his regime’s nuclear arms development programs and oppressive treatment of the North Korean people. Over the last few years, Kim has continued defiantly developing his nuclear arms program while simultaneously allowing millions of his own people starve to death.
As the Bush Administration’s treatment of the Iraqi dictator Sadaam Hussein’s regime has attracted intense scrutiny from the international community since 2003 and as Kim and his regime announced just earlier this year they had completed building at least one nuclear bomb, North Korea could not be a more crosscut or nuanced subject of debate among government officials and human rights activists of all types. Those concerned with bringing the North Korean citizens internationally verifiable basic freedoms, deserved by all persons in the world, gathered today at the Mayflower Hotel for Freedom House’s ‘North Korea Freedom’ event, to speak out, “to give voice to the voiceless North Korean citizens”.
Radio Free Asia broadcast the event, which will last into this evening, live to North and South Korea, as well as several other stations, giving the day’s speakers much impetus to deliver impassioned statements on behalf of those still suffering inside North Korea and those who have found their way out and are now suffering from trauma. NGO leaders and activists, press, senior government officials, and religious leaders from Southeast Asia and the U.S. gathered with North Korean defectors, refugees, and survivors of the refugee sex and slavery trafficking rings that are plaguing the Northeastern part of China to stand together and say in one voice that security cannot now, and should never have been, the most important issue concerning North Korea when 4 million North Koreans have starved to death under Kim Jong’s regime since 1995.
The final session of the morning part of the event consisted of a four person panel focusing on the present conditions of North Korean defectors in China, elsewhere, and also throughout the repatriation process. The two moderators, Mr. Tim Peters and Reverend Chun Ki-Won, were both freshly arrived from South Korea having been working on the ‘underground railroad’ to help defectors cross the border safely and then to help them avoid being caught by North Korean soldiers or Chinese police, who are adamantly against North Korean defectors. The panel followed the story of a 13 year-old North Korean girl who had successfully defected from North Korea, alone. The morning’s events appropriately began the day as the afternoon continued with presentations from those who have lived the horrors inside North Korea, supplemented by discussion and commentary from activists working from the outside.
Attendees heard firsthand accounts of daughters sold to slave rings as pseudo-wives or sex slaves for less than 2000$ U.S., definitions of genocide leaving no room for exclusion of the North Korean situation from influential human rights activists, estimates of the still-alive-and-starving persons inside North Korea double that of the 300,000—which had been the watermark until now. Car-size photographs of emaciated North Korean children and satellite photographs of gulags (prison camps), execution sites, and labor sites inside North Korea lined the walls of the Mayflower’s Grand Ballroom.
Religious representatives from the Southern Baptist and Episcopalian Christian Churches, the South Korean Christian Church, and Washington’s Jewish community presided over a panel late in the afternoon. Individually, they each delivered a message based in their own faith stating how and why members of their disparate religious communities need to unite and call for freedom of North Korean citizens from the vice grips of Kim’s Pyongyang regime. The people who gathered today were united by a genuine belief in and desire to see the elevation of the North Korean people out of poverty and hunger, slavery and genocide.
