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Springtime in the Gulag: S. Korean Gov’t Says Play ‘Dwells Too Heavily on Negative Aspects’ of Concentration Camp Life

Update: Welcome Instapundit readers!

So it has come to this: it is no longer legal to criticize the human rights record of North Korea in Seoul, South Korea. For those who would defy the rising vicarious control of North Korea’s Ministry of Public Security on the streets of Seoul, here is what happens next:

A planned musical about human rights abuses in North Korea’s Yoduk concentration camp has run into massive obstacles, not least from officials fearful of upsetting the Stalinist country. South Korean government agencies are demanding changes to the story, which they say dwells too heavily on the negative aspects of the camp [!], according to producers. Officials also allegedly invoked the National Security Law to warn producers against showing a portrait of former leader Kim Il-sung and the singing of North Korean songs in the show.

The obvious irony: Roh and his partisans came to office campaigning for the repeal of the very same National Security Law, which was once used by the former right-wing dictatorship to suppress leftists and pro-democracy activists.

The Story South Korea Doesn’t Want Told

There are few places on earth as horrific as North Korea’s political prison camps, where guards are offered rich rewards for killing escaping prisoners, where children are imprisoned with their parents, and as many as 25% of those locked away die from disease, abuse, starvation, and cold annually. Where entire families allegedly die in gas chambers. Where babies are killed if presumed to be racially impure. Etcetera, etcetera.

“Yoduk Story” focuses on a camp where 20,000 inmates work more than 14 hours a day living on just one bowl of cereal and a spoonful of salt. Those who try to escape are executed by hanging or stoning because the authorities do not want to waste bullets killing them.

. . . .

“After reading our script, government officials demanded that we change part of the story, saying it’s too much,” Chung said. “I got a phone call, I don’t know if it was a government official, saying ‘It’s so easy to get you. You will be punished.'”

Driven by an inflexible ideology of appeasing North Korea at any cost, South Korea’s current government, elected in 2002, has a history of silencing North Korean defectors and suppressing demonstrations against its appalling human rights record. South Korea has abstained from multiple U.N. resolutions denouncing the North’s torture and terrorizing of its own people. Its biggest corporations have grand visions of exploiting cheap, docile North Korean labor for big profits. Its foreign policy has shifted from a strong alliance with the United States, supported by billions in U.S. taxpayer funds annually, to a declared neutrality between its protector and those from whom South Korea is presumably protected.

You can read a very detailed report on North Korea’s concentration camps and see satellite photos of them here at the Web site of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

The Thug’s Veto

This is a matter of particular concern to we, the unloved thousands of American vets who served in South Korea for the ostensible purpose of keeping its society free. This time, the Red Guards have had some temporary success:

After the Chosun Ilbo ran a story about the musical, one theater abruptly canceled the run there and a company which had promised to invest W300 million (US$300,000) pulled out.

A key member of the production team has quit, and the director Chung Seong-san, who happens to be a North Korean defector himself, has received death threats.

Chung, whose father was stoned to death in one of the camps, is so determined to see the play run that he’s borrowed against a contract to sell one of his kidneys, which is material for a whole other posting all by itself.

And where are the police? Just where they were during all of the incidents reported below–checking themselves for rectal polyps. Let’s take stock of where South Korea’s freedom of speech has gone since the election of the former human rights lawyer, Roh Moo Hyun:

  • BBC (Aug. ’03), North Korean reporters clash with protesters in South’s Taegu over human rights (preserved on Free Republic) (On a 2003 attack by North Korean “journalists” against peaceful protestors for human rights in North Korea at an international athletic event. The South Korean police stood by during the attack; the S. Korean government later apologized to North Korea over the incident and promised to prevent similar demonstrations in the future).
  • BBC (Aug. ’03) Radio Air-Drop into North Korea Thwarted (It was thwarted by a then-unlikely alliance of South Korean police and leftist thugs; some of those trying to launch the balloons were hospitalized).
  • Asia Times (May ’04), Double Jeopardy for North Korean Defectors (“In the new South Korea, thuggery pays. It is here that bullies, enemies of free speech, of toleration, of democracy are being nourished in the country’s so-called progressive democratization. Not only are they challenging the values of free speech and toleration, but now they are attacking the victims who seek asylum from the tyrannical regime in North Korea.”).
  • OFK (Dec. ’05): How I Really Feel About Chung Dong-Young (on the government’s dirty tricks campaign to depress press coverage of Freedom House’s Seoul conference for human rights in North Korea, and to discourage church groups from participating in follow-on demonstrations for human rights in the North).
  • OFK (Feb. ’06): If You Know What’s Good for You . . . . (According to a National Human Rights Commission study, nearly one in five North Korean defectors living in the South report being threatened to discourage them from criticizing North or South Korean government policies).
How To Help: Did the Government Block the Yoduk Story Site?

If you live in Seoul, you can call 02-569-4483. If not, I’d have recommended going to www.yodukstory.com, but the site is down for reasons I can’t quite definitively explain. The South Korean government has a history of blocking blogs and Web sites, although it’s possible that the site crashed due to high traffic after the Chosun Ilbo printed its url. I will update the story in about 48 hours, by which time one would expect a crashed site to be back up, but a blocked site to remain down.

Meanwhile, my e-mail in-box is filled with messages from astonished journalists, bloggers, and congressional staff. One of my correspondents had another idea: let’s invite Yoduk Story to America. We can bring the players to the United States, where they might even perform parts of the play on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Members of our Congress who came to attend for a few minutes could send a powerful message of support to these brave North Koreans–who have now stood up to the oppression of two governments–that we believe in their right to speak freely.

You can find your representatives in the House here, and in the Senate, here.

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