Kang Chol Hwan on the Concentration Camps

Kang makes a compelling argument for understanding the “root cause” of all of our problems with North Korea:

The silence of the international community on the barbaric massacres in the concentration camps committed by Kim Jong-il borders on the criminal. Some 17,000 North Korean defectors in the South are complaining about the atrocity, but no country pays any attention. Even the South Korean government and people do not realize how serious the problem is.

As a surgeon may kill a patient with a wrong diagnosis, so more and more North Korean citizens may lose their lives if the international community makes a wrong diagnosis of the North Korea issue.

Had the U.S. diverted a tenth of the effort it invested in freeing the two journalists imprisoned in the North on the concentration camp problem, the groundwork for resolving the North Korea issue would already have be done. Had the Seoul government demanded the elimination of the concentration camps in return for the massive economic aid it provided to the North a decade ago, the North would have long started on the path to reform and opening.

The closure of the concentration camps would end the reign of terror, and the public would be able to criticize the regime. This would lead to weakening the totalitarian system and forming a new leadership, resulting in reform and opening. [Chosun Ilbo]

I don’t agree with Kang’s statement that the camps are less like Stalin’s gulags than Auschwitz — they aren’t, either in methods or scale — but I can understand why a survivor like Kang would resort to some hyperbole when, years after the publication of his gulag memoir, South Korea’s moral outrage can only be averted from Tokdo by “news” of the unique vulnerability of “pure” Korean genes to Mad Cow Disease.

South Koreans will play little constructive role in their own reunification but will spend much time complaining about its cost and accusing their North Korean maids of stealing their Swarovski jewelry.