North Korea Freedom Week 2007: Reminding the World of North Korea’s Cruelty to its Own People

Left to his own devices now, when it comes to the treatment of his own people, Kim Jong-Il has already been responsible for the death of millions of North Koreans.  Some two million have died of starvation in this isolated land.  This deadly hunger occurs even as loyal party members dine in obscene luxury in Pyongyang’s nightclubs and casinos.  Thousands have died in the many prison labor facilities that blot North Korea’s landscape. Christian believers, among other undesirable groups, have been singled out for torture and execution.

NKFC Chairman Suzanne Scholte speaks, surrounded by images of North Korea’s horror.

One of the other participants in the Six Party Talks, China, must also take responsibility for the deaths of many North Koreans.  North Koreans who flee over the border to China are forcibly repatriated to almost certain death, if caught by the Chinese authorities.  China does not comply with the international standards requiring it to give asylum to these refugees from persecution.  Instead China treats them as economic migrants who have no right to stay—or even to travel through China to another country where they might receive a warmer welcome.To remind the world of these egregious human rights abuses committed by Kim Jong-Il, advocates and activists observed North Korea Freedom Week, April 22-29, 2007.  The first North Korea Freedom Day was introduced on April 28, 2004, by the North Korea Freedom Coalition (NKFC).  This year the NKFC, led by Chairman Suzanne Scholte, sponsored awareness-raising events, including hearings, panel discussions, demonstrations, and an art exhibit. The Institute on Religion and Democracy is a charter member of NKFC, a bipartisan, international coalition of some 60 religious, human rights, and other non-governmental organizations.

This three part series will describe some of the North Korea Freedom Weeks events to remind the world of North Korea’s cruelty towards its own people.  Part I describes the opening of the North Korea Genocide Exhibit on Capitol Hill. Part II will focus on a panel discussion of religious freedom in North Korea held at the National Press Club. Part III will provide a glimpse into the rally at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC, urging China to stop forced repatriation of North Korean refugees.

Part 1:  The Opening of the North Korea Genocide Exhibit

Art and Artifact as Witness
The story of North Korea’s oppressed and enslaved people came to life in Washington, DC, last month through the North Korea Genocide Exhibit. A heartrending assemblage of drawings, paintings, photographs, artifacts, and letters from North Korean prisoners and escapees, the exhibit was sponsored by the International Coalition to Save the North Korean Slaves.  It opened on Tuesday, April 24, 2007, with a ribbon cutting ceremony in the crowded basement of Ebenezer’s Coffeehouse on Capitol Hill.

Special guests and dignitaries assist in the ribbon cutting at the North Korea Genocide Exhibit.

Art therapy is a well-respected technique for helping traumatized persons to deal with the horrors of the past.  Sadly, for many North Koreans whose drawings are included in the North Korea Genocide Exhibit, the horror is still present.  For some, only death will bring relief from the agonizing hunger that gnaws at their bodies, the incessant brainwashing concerning “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il, the torment of prison camp guards, and the terror of being captured from some underground hovel in China and brought back to face brutal torture in North Korea.  This background makes all the more poignant the refugees’ pictures of skeletal women, starving children gazing at a table full of food being enjoyed by a Communist party member, and guards threatening cowering prisoners.Also poignant was the display of paper cranes.  Tiny folded birds of every color filled a glass case by the thousands.  All of them were created by a family of Christian North Korean refugees in hiding in China.  Their efforts were modeled after a Japanese legend that says that if you can fold one thousand paper cranes, the gods of the wind will come and grant your wish.  In this case, the paper cranes were prayers to the one true God.

Drawings by North Korean prisoners such as this one provide a window into their lives in the North Korean gulag.

Scraps of unremarkable clothing make for an unusual exhibit.  But however unexceptional these bits of shirts and pants may seem to be, they hold a story of struggle and heartbreak.  A small card explained that these pieces of fabric were taken from the corpses of North Korean escapees who drowned while attempting to cross the Tumen River into China.  The fate of the North Koreans is reminiscent of the comment by the former slave Equiano to William Wilberforce in the film Amazing Grace: “Your life is a thread.  It breaks, or it does not break.”  The broken threads of North Korean lives fill the Tumen River as surely as do the sodden remnants of clothing.The works of art and artifacts at the North Korea Genocide Exhibit were lovingly collected and displayed by Korean advocates and rescuers Moon Kook Ha and Sin U Nam.  The silent witness of the exhibit was echoed by the spoken words of political leaders, activists, and North Korean defectors and refugees who participated in the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Speaking Out for the People of North Korea
U.S. Representative Ed Royce (R-CA), a loyal friend of the fight for freedom in North Korea, was the keynote speaker at the opening of the North Korea Genocide Exhibit.  Congressman Royce urged action for the North Koreans, saying, “There are times for quiet diplomacy, but I fear that quiet diplomacy has become synonymous with inaction.”  He told the crowd gathered in the coffeehouse basement that North Korean Human Rights Envoy Jay Lefkowitz referred to North Korea as “an Asian Darfur.”

Royce pointed out the pictures of starving North Korean children, including some dressed in blue striped uniforms that were hauntingly reminiscent of those worn in World War II concentration camps. He told the audience how in 1945 his father had visited Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp, and had taken photographs to document the evil. “You are documenting what my father documented,” Royce told the creators of the exhibit.

U.S. Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) addresses the crowd at the opening of the North Korea Genocide Exhibit.

After Royce’s remarks, a procession of speakers, many with deeply personal and painful experiences of North Korea, took the microphone.  Not just Koreans had been affected. Other testimonies showed the reach of the evil perpetrated by the Kim Jong-Il regime—even to the shores of Japan, where Japanese citizens were abducted away from their families by North Korean agents.  Teruaki Masumoto, the Secretary General of the Association of the Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea (AFVKN), spoke of losing his own sister Rumiko.  His pain was echoed by Ms. Fumiyo Saitoh, whose younger brother, Kaoru Matsuki, was abducted by North Korean agents in 1980 from Madrid.One speaker, the Rev. Philip Buck, had been unable to attend North Korea Freedom Week 2006 because he was in jail in China.  Buck, an American citizen, had sheltered and fed thousands of North Koreans who had fled to China.  He also helped over 100 reach freedom in South Korea.  Buck was arrested in May 2005 in the middle of an operation to rescue 30 North Koreans.  Due to pressure from around the world, he was released in August 2006.  NKFC Chairman Scholte told the crowd that Buck was considered a “big fish” by the Chinese authorities who captured him.

Buck provided nightmarish details of the lives of North Korean refugees in China.  “China is … a nation without human rights,” he declared.  It shows the desperation of North Koreans that they would flee to such a country, where over 80 percent of the North Korean women are trafficked for sex slavery.  “China does not qualify to be a country to host the Olympics,” Buck concluded.

Another brave rescuer, also arrested and imprisoned by the Chinese government, was the next speaker.  Choi Young Hun, a South Korean businessman and humanitarian worker, spent almost four years in jail in China for attempting to help 86 North Koreans escape from China by boat.  The “Yantai Boat People” operation was leaked to the Chinese authorities, who arrested Choi on January 18, 2003, as he was working to bring the North Koreans together for their escape. Thanks to international pressure, he was released November 29, 2006.

Choi recounted the experiences of North Koreans who were repatriated to the Kim Jong-Il regime.  North Koreans who were repatriated were tortured and sexually abused, he said.  They were forced to labor for up to 16 hours a day.  Choi also told of his own mistreatment in the Chinese prison.  The authorities there allowed other prisoners to beat him until the lower part of his body was temporarily paralyzed.  Choi thanked God that he was a South Korean citizen.  If the Chinese were willing to so abuse a South Korean citizen, he wondered what would happen to someone who did not have the protection of another government.

Teruaki Masumoto, from Japan, who lost his sister Rumiko when she was abducted by the North Koreans, addresses the crowd at the North Korea Genocide Exhibit.

The next speaker, a defector who had been employed by the North Korea Defense Headquarters, called himself “Philip Lee” for security purposes.  Lee, a first year seminarian, is the secretary of the 70-member United Group of Ministers for North Korean Refugees. He escaped from North Korea in February 1999.  A month later, while hiding in China, he became a Christian at a Korean-Chinese church in Jilin Province and became involved in the underground church. In September 2001 Lee was arrested by Chinese authorities and repatriated to Sin Ui Joo.  While in jail he witnessed the persecution of Christians prisoners.  He escaped North Korea again in October 2001 but was arrested in Hwa Ryong, China, and forcibly repatriated to North Korea and to prison.  Lee was miraculously released from prison in December 2001 and escaped from North Korea in February 2002.  In March 2002, he began his escape to South Korea, traveling from China to Vietnam to Cambodia.  He eventually arrived in South Korea on July 24, 2002.

To demonstrate the misery inflicted upon women who are trying to find freedom and a better life, Lee told the story of a young North Korean woman who fled to China.  She was caught by traffickers and sold 23 times. The traffickers would sell her to someone, and then pretend to be the Chinese police and come and take her back and sell her to someone else.  She was beaten, raped, and threatened with death by the traffickers. Miraculously, the woman found her way to the Korean-Chinese church where Lee led her to Christ.  She is now living in South Korea, where she has a husband and family. But there are thousands of other North Korean women who have not been so lucky.  “We need to achieve refugee status for North Koreans in China,” Lee pleaded.

Another North Korean using a pseudonymn for security purposes was Mrs. Chiba Yomiko, the only known survivor of the above-mentioned Yantai boat incident of 2003.  She was born in Japan of Korean parents and returned with them to North Korea when she was three years old.  Her family was in the Communist Party, and she had relatives in the North Korean government.  Chiba explained that she herself was also a loyal party member who taught gymnastics and traditional dance at a college in Sinuiju until she had a nightmarish experience that changed her view of the Kim Jong-Il regime.

Chiba related to the audience how in 1995, North Korean famine victims from the far north of the country began to appear in her town, in search of food.  Each morning more emaciated bodies would lie in silent reproach of the North Korean regime in the streets and the fields.  Chiba and her students were ordered by the authorities to dispose of the dead.  Each day, they had to pick up the bodies, cover them, and hide them in a vacant building.  At night they had to move the bodies to burial pits in the fields outside of town, bury them, and plant grass to mask the land’s actual function. This hellish activity went on for 35 days.

Following her awakening to the true humanitarian crisis that was being covered over by the North Korean government, Chiba started to speak out against the regime.  She was threatened with arrest and eventually escaped to China, where she was in hiding for three years, she said.

In January 2003, Chiba was with the some 86 North Koreans who attempted to flee to Japan on a boat from the Chinese city of Yantai.  She told how the attempted flight was thwarted by the Chinese authorities, and of the terrible suffering and torture of the North Korean refugees.

Satellite image at the exhibit shows the location of North Korea’s many prison camps. (click to enlarge)

“It was a place where I wanted to die, but I could not die,” she said, her voice choked with tears.  She told how others did die—some being called (by number, never by name) each day and never returning.  One was an elderly lady who told the guards every day that she just wanted to go to South Korea to see her daughter before she died.  A day came when the guards called her number and she did not come back.  In another case, guards brought a feverish nine-year-old boy—”only bones, with leather over them,” Chiba said—to find his mother.  The mother begged the guards to help the boy, whereupon they dragged her away.  She was returned an hour later, with her face swollen from beating.Because she insisted, despite interrogation and torture, that she was not one of the boat people, Chiba was finally released on May 20, 2003.   She eventually escaped to Japan, but remains committed to speaking out about what she experienced and witnessed in North Korea.

Kang Chul Hwan, author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang and founder of the Democracy Network against the North Korean Gulag, was perhaps the most famous of the defectors participating in the opening.  When he was eight years old, Kang was sent to Yoduk Political Prisoners Camp with his grandparents.  He is an example of how the North Korean regime punishes families to the third generation.  Kang was released from Yoduk after ten years and escaped to South Korea in August 1992. He had the opportunity to meet President George Bush, who was inspired by his book.  He now works as a reporter for South Korea’s leading newspaper, Chosun Ilbo.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the North Korea Genocide Exhibit opening was the commonality between the words of the speakers and the message of the exhibit pieces.  Both testified to the extraordinary cruelty of which human beings are capable, and to the shocking callousness in the face of such cruelty.  Even more so, however, they testify to the courage and determination of the North Korean people to risk everything for the chance to find freedom.