Before Robert Park entered North Korea this Christmas Day he was in Seoul, working as an energetic activist in the North Korean human rights field. Just a few days before he left for China en route for the North, Robert gave an interview to Reuters on the proviso that it not be released until after he crossed the Tumen River. Now Robert is inside North Korea, and Reuters released the full text of the interview on December 30th.
In the interview Robert speaks in damning terms of those he feels are wronging the North Korean people by denying, or failing to advocate for, their human rights, from Kim Jong Il himself to the Obama government and more.
Much of it is fair criticism indeed.
It is fair to say that desperate moves are sometimes effective tools. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the youths of South Korea were fighting for democracy, there were many incidents of great desperation and bravery: the self-immolation of two young Seoul National University students at a busy crossroads, for example.
When those who led these demonstrations felt the situation to be so desperate that they could not avoid sacrificing themselves, they made the ultimate choice. It was undeniably brave. At that time, students, socialists and democratization activists believed that their sacrifices could and would ignite a struggle among the people and bring their goals to fruition. Of course, there was horrific damage, not to mention the loss of passionate young lives. How much influence these specific sacrifices had on that goal, nobody can truly judge.
Regardless, although Robert certainly did not experience the South Korean students’ democratization movement nor even know much of its history, he surely did feel the current degree of public awareness of and concern for North Korean human rights issues in the world to be desperately low, and action of some kind to be imperative.
He expresses his frustration in the interview, speaking of the gulf in passion between people demonstrating for North Korean human rights and the many who took the streets to campaign against American imports of beef earlier this year: “There were hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea demonstrating for this ridiculous thing about the kind of beef… We can be mobilized to demonstrate about the kind of beef we are getting and we cannot demonstrate for people who are our own kin who are dying by the thousands every day for no reason at all.”
But there is more to this than bravery and admirable sacrifice. What Robert does not do in the interview is come close to accounting for the potential damage his actions could bring about.
Robert has some knowledge of the activities of religious groups in the North Korea-China border region, and every one of the people he knows could now be in danger, just as they were when Laura Ling and Euna Lee were captured and their recordings confiscated, while China, facing another diplomatic problem related to its border security, will probably strengthen its guard along the frontier. At the very least, this will cause those NGOs working along the border under great pressure a considerable extra, unnecessary headache.
Furthermore, giving Kim Jong Il another pawn to ransom for aid should he so choose is unhelpful at a time when international financial pressure on the North is being given some credit for bringing Pyongyang back somewhere near the negotiating table of late.
Additionally, it is clear that what Kim Jong Il used this year’s visit of Bill Clinton for was shoring up his domestic legitimacy by putting on a display of a powerful man coming to shake his hand. These are propaganda victories that we would be much better off not handing Kim so cheaply; we can only hope that it doesn’t come to something similar this time.
It does not appear from the interview that Robert gave these very real concerns anything close to adequate thought but, to conclude, what is indisputable is that Robert’s fundamental motivations for doing what he did are shared and understood by many in the North Korean human rights community. For better or worse, nobody put that better than Robert himself;
“What is happening in North Korea is genocide. We know there are legitimate fears about what could happen through nuclear weapons. But a nation that runs concentration camps, a nation that kills men, women and children without any kind of restraint can never be trusted.
The United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea have a huge responsibility to speak out about this, because all these nations played a role in the arbitrary division of the Koreas, where not a single Korean was consulted. Yet the lives of these people are of no issue to these governments. That is a crime. It is a huge crime.”
“I am going in for the sake of the lives of the North Korean people,” he concludes, “And if he (Kim Jong-il) kills me, in a sense, I realize this is better. Then the governments of the world will become more prone to say something, and more embarrassed and more forced to make a statement.”
In many ways, Robert is right. While the U.S. uses its leverage to pursue denuclearization, while Japan appears only interested in the abductees’ issue, while South Korea works on the possibility of another summit meeting, and while the majority of people simply don’t do anything, there are people dying in North Korea every day. Perhaps not thousands, as Robert suggests, but far, far too many for whom far, far too little is being done.
There is much to learn from the single-minded determination and loyalty to a cause that Robert has displayed in the process of making his choice.
Thankfully, in reality, the chances of Kim Jong Il killing him are vanishingly small, indeed his deportation seems by far the most likely outcome, and for that everyone ought to be grateful. Were the chances of the average North Korean being killed by his or her own tyrannical government equally slim, Robert might not have felt compelled to cross the Tumen River at all.
Let us all hope, then, that by this time in 2010, Robert has turned out to be the very last person who felt the need to act in this courageous but dangerous manner, because there is no longer a North Korean human rights problem at all.
