Kang Chol-hwan’s lecture at Sogang university

(By guest blogger, Andy Jackson)

This is the first in a four-part series on lectures concerning human rights in North Korea delivered at Sogang University in Seoul on November 26, 2005. The text in block quotes were taken from my notes of the translation of Kang’s lecture. Any inaccuracies in the text are strictly my own.

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Kang Chol-hwan is not one to pull his punches. He has seen and experienced too much to care for diplomatic language. His youthful, even boyish, looks belie urgency and anger; urgency to end the suffering of his compatriots in North Korea and anger at both the regime in Pyongyang and its supporters south of the DMZ. Those factors make Kang rhetorically pugnacious, even by Korean standards.

As Kang came to the podium, the now famous picture of him with President Bush flashed on a screen behind him. His speech was translated from Korean by a member of one of the sponsoring student groups.

Thank you.

LiNK (Liberty in North Korea) for sponsored a trip I took to the United States. I visited ten universities including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley and Columbia, among others. I thank LiNK. They are passionate about human rights in North Korea. I also feel encouraged by the interest on American campuses in supporting the cause of freedom in North Korea.

I remember, when I was a university student (in South Korea), hearing a North Korean song. Some students were singing it. When North Koreans hear that song, they usually turn the radio or TV off because it is so long and boring. So I asked them ‘why are you singing that song.’ They were surprised to find out that the song praised Kim Il-sung. There were many pro-North Korean books and flyers on campus. It was almost impossible to debate (campus leftists) because they were so completely indoctrinated.

I do not understand why there was so much anti-Americanism on Korean campuses. Even in Japan, on which the United States dropped two atomic bombs, there is not that much anti-Americanism. America is not perfect. It has made mistakes but it does not deserve the high level of criticism that it receives on Korean campuses….

The Pyongyang regime has put a great deal of effort and expense to influence South Korean college students. The United Nations and many nations are addressing human rights in North Korea but the South Korean government is silent.

I do not understand why those who were involved in the democracy movement (in 1980s in the ROK) are not concerned with North Korean human rights. They compare Park Chang-hee and Chung Doo-hwan to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il but they are incomparable. After the anti-Kim Il-sung movement in 1958 (see here) even distance relatives were put into labor camps in the resulting purge. Kim Dae-jung’s torture at the KCIA center at Namsam would be just a normal beating in North Korea….

What the South Korean Human Rights Commission worries about, such as sexual harassment, is not a big deal compared with what goes on in North Korea….

South Koreans ask me why there are no protests in North Korea. North Koreans are tougher than South Koreans because of the more mountainous terrain. North Koreans fight a lot (more on the North Korean propensity for fighting here).

But the regime was able to instill deep fear into the North Korean people. There are public executions. The prisoners are starved and beaten. Their bones are broken. They are gagged so they can’t speak against Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il. Guards used to gag them with cloth but the prisoners would sometimes spit the cloth out, so now they are gagged with springs or stones. When the guards force the stones into the prisoners’ mouths, they usually break out their teeth. They then carry the prisoners out and publicly execute them.

There will be no public protests in North Korea because they are too afraid.

At this point Kang cut his lecture short and gave the rest of his allotted time to a defector who had once worked in one of North Korea’s intelligence services. That man’s statement will be the subject of my next post

You can read more on Kang’s experiences in the Yeoduk prison camp here.