Update 1: I’m going to bump this post up a few times. Meanwhile, I second Kyochan’s advice: Digg the story. I didn’t have an account, but it only took a few seconds to sign up. And I see that Reporters Without Borders is e-mailing half the world over … Saddam Hussein’s execution! Well, here, here! Let’s exhume the old bus-bombing rapist. Scroll down to see my response, and RSF’s reply to that. They claim not to have an opinion on Saddam’s execution, although they’re sending out a weighted sampling of world opinion to what must be a gargantuan list of bloggers. And to think I used to have an RSF button on my old blogger site.

Original Post: Returning from a day out with my family today, I found that I’d received emails from several Liberty in North Korea members (thank you), including its Executive Director, Adrian Hong. For new readers, LiNK is among several groups of courageous activists who form a modern underground railroad along which North Korean refugees escape the repression and starvation of their homeland, through China, to refuge in South Korea or other places (much more information on these refugees here).

Adrian, at least two other LiNK members, and six refugees were arrested by the Chinese just before Christmas. Adrian (media interviews here, here, and here) and the other LiNK members were released, but the six refugees face a very grim fate:

The six refugees in jail in Shenyang include two orphan boys, ages 16 and 17; a 22-year-old woman; and three women in their 40s. One of the older women is the mother of a 19-year-old who made it to safety in the U.S. consulate last year and is awaiting resettlement in the U.S. along with two orphan boys — if China lets them leave. One of the women has relatives in Hawaii; another has family in South Korea.

The six were captured just before Christmas along with two Americans who had been sheltering them in safe houses in another city and were accompanying them to the consulate. Their rescuers — young women who don’t want their names used — belong to Liberty in North Korea, or LINK, a U.S. non-profit dedicated to helping the refugees. LINK’s director, Adrian Hong, was also arrested — pulled out of his hotel room in Beijing and taken to a prison cell in Shenyang. The three rescuers were deported this week.

[subscriber link here; longer excerpt here]

I have deeply mixed emotions on reading this news. I am relieved that my friend Adrian will not share the fate of Phillip Buck, Steve Kim, and Choi Yung Hun, who spent years in Chinese prisons. And as I write, amidst my sleeping family, I feel despair for these refugees. Past reports tell us that the Chinese will jab wires through their wrists or noses and drag them back to North Korea. Because they have had contact with foreigners opposed to the regime, they are as good as dead on arrival. A common punishment for this sort of betrayal of the slave state’s total control is public execution by firing squad, before a captive audience. That was the fate of the people in this guerrilla camera footage.

(China’s abuse and repatriation of these refugees is a flagrant violation of the 1951 U.N. Convention on Refugees, which China signed, but of course, China really doesn’t care, and neither does the U.N., nor do the hypocrites who comprise the majority of the Human Rights Industry. Ditto the “managed famine” that killed two million North Koreans during its largest-ever arms binge.)

Why the crackdown? Because the food situation in North Korea is deteriorating fast, Kim Jong Il’s regime is under an increasingly effective financial attack from the United States Treasury Department, and the Chinese are doing everything they can to preserve their North Korean puppet and partial colony. They may also be seeking to slave-catch their way to a refugee-free Olympics by 2008.

As sad as that may be, this does remove one agonizing question from the shoulders of activists who had adopted a less confrontational approach with China for fear that we’d see just this result. China is testing the world’s reaction, and I share China’s confidence that Ban Ki Moon and the U.N. won’t do anything particularly effective to interfere. South Korea ceased to be a significant part of this discussion, except as a reluctant destination for North Korea refugees, around the time Ban became its foreign minister. The U.S. role has sadly never gone beyond token gestures and lip service, notwithstanding a federal statute requiring our embassies to “facilitate the submission of applications” for asylum by North Koreans. There can be no stronger argument for the adoption of more controversial tactics on our part, to match China’s, to something louder, more public, and if possible, more economically costly, and more humiliating for China and its diplomats: everyone else has betrayed the North Korean people.

What can you do to save these people, and those who will follow? First, I’d encourage you to join or contribute to LiNK and to keep an eye on their site. And while the Chinese are used to dealing with dissent by shooting their way through it, I believe that enough of an e-mail and telephone blitz on their embassy would at least be a factor in how they deal with these six people (here, I would deeply appreciate any sympathetic links fellow bloggers would be kind enough to provide, to help spread the word about China’s conduct and encourage reconsideration of attending the Beijing Olympics, which are one reason for these slave hunts). Finally, this may call for some ferociously creative activism, possibly in concert with other groups that oppose the Chinese dictatorship’s trampling of human rights. The only certain way not to miss it is to join LiNK.

Update: And what is the Human Rights Industry up to today?

RSF sends:

Each week, Reporters Without Borders publishes the opinions of bloggers throughout the world on an important development, thereby broadening the range of views on current events. The blogs are selected by a team of bloggers of very diverse origins and cultures. We give priority to blogs which Internet users have written in their mother tongue, and we translate them into English and French.

This week : what bloggers from France, Irak, Uruguay, Iran, USA… say about Saddam Hussein’s execution

I respond:

Well, I see that RSF has its borders back, or else it has officially lost all contact with its sense of mission purpose, and proportion.

A tyrant is tried, convicted, and hanged for genocide. You pull out all the stops to inform me that people are outraged in Ecuador. Two million North Koreans are deliberately starved to death in what this scholarly report, commissioned by Vaclav Havel and Elie Wiesel, calls a “crime against humanity.” And you ignore the fact that it’s about to happen again.

This, I submit, is why you have ceased to be a force for the dignity and protection of the voiceless millions.

Last week, the Chinese arrested six North Korean refugees. Unlike Saddam, they are innocent of any crime. Unlike Saddam, they will not face trial. Two of them are children. China will soon send them to almost certain death in North Korea, probably by firing squad in public, in flagrant violation of the UN Refugee Convention. The UNHCR, cowed and possibly bought by China, will not utter one word on their behalf. These refugees were arrested with three human rights activists, members of a courageous group called LiNK.

Will you help us save them, or will you go on trying to dig up Saddam?

If the death of one man — particularly one so unworthy of being mourned, and who was afforded the rare luxury of a trial — is statistically insignificant, the consensus of the Ecuadorian street about it is surely even less significant.

You’ve become just another industry following the dictates of your markets. You have ceased to lead in a direction of moral significance. Have the decency to seek gainful employment.

Ecuador, Uruguay, France, same diff. RSF responds:

We’re just publising and translating blogger’s opinions (and not all of them regret saddam’s execution). Nothing more.

This has nothing to do with the RSF position on this issue.

And I respond:

Great. So you’re using your resources on an issue on which you have no opinion, then?

I will be speaking with the heads of the North Korean Freedom Coalition and LiNK today. We’d love to have your assistance in saving these innocent North Korean lives.

And back to RSF:

We have opinions on Press Freedom, which is our role. And we very often denounce what happening in North Korea. Ex, this country is on our list of the “13 enemies of the Internet” :

http://www.rsf.org/int_blackholes_en.php3?id_mot=260&annee=2007&Valider=OK Or http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=1073

And suddenly, RSF snaps back into its “role,” which is protecting press freedom, and which relates to Saddam Hussein’s hanging how, exactly? But snaps to RSF for covering itself, although not once have I seen any of these e-mailings devoted primarily or exclusively to North Korea, nor, for the life of me. And while I strongly believe in the need for more freedom of information in North Korea, I think the last thing that North Koreans are worrying about — you know, with the famine probably returning and all — is Internet access. So I said, simply:

Saddam? Press freedom? Connection, please?

How sad that so many organizations with so much power to lead have chosen to squander it instead.