The man at the center of a storm currently brewing in Liaoning Province, NKnet researcher Kim Young Hwan has long been a victim of threats emanating from North Korea or pro-North Korean groups.
He is not alone; the main targets of North Korean anger have always been groups working for North Korean democratization and human rights. However, Kim is one person set apart from this general hatred; first, because he has met Kim Il Sung and received orders directly from him, even discussing revolutionary tasks in South Korea with the North Korean founder. In addition, following his conversion to the opposing cause in the 1990s, Kim went on to work closely with former Workers’ Party secretary Hwang Jang Yop, someone who was regarded as the greatest betrayer of all by Pyongyang.
One particularly infamous incident occurred in 2000, shortly after Kim and a group of like-minded individuals had founded NKnet, one of the first non-profit groups dedicated to democratization and improving human rights in North Korea. On day, a threatening letter arrived at the offices of the fledgling organization in a parcel which also contained the bodies of five dead mice with ripped up mouths.
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The letter was titled (see picture) “Unheard-of turncoats and shabby betrayers Han Ki Hong, Kim Young Hwan, Hong Jin Pyo, Cho Hyuk and Cho Yoo Sik cannot avoid the stern judgment of history.” In it, the anonymous authors declared, “Kim Young Hwan and his gang fancy themselves as powerful activists of the 80s and 90s and insist upon the idea of North Korean democratization, but the whole world already knows that they are the most uniquely hideous of turncoats and shabby betrayers.”
“In which case, what is it that we shall give to that turncoat and betrayer of a generation Kim Young Hwan and his gang,” it went on to muse, concluding, “The fate of Kim Young Hwan and his gang has turned to corpses.”
At the end of the letter were a number of demands, including the closure of the NKnet website and an end to the affiliated Zeitgeist publishing house, and the date: December 19th, Juche 89. Looking at the style and terms used, the authorities subsequently declared that it could have been written in North Korea. They embarked on an investigation, but the culprits were never discovered.
Although this was the most serious event to occur to Kim in fifteen years of campaigning for North Korean human rights up until the current incarceration, threatening letters and comments have also been repeatedly left on the homepage of NKnet and in e-mails sent to the accounts of people working there. In 2004 an image of Kim with a red slash across his face was also published on a pro-North Korea website.
