Chosun Ilbo: North Korean guards beat Robert Park “to within an inch of his life.”
Sources say Robert Park, an ethnic Korean, told them he is an American citizen and came to call for human rights improvements and to urge leader Kim Jong-il “to repent.” In response, the guards beat him to within an inch of his life. Even remaining silent while another person denounces the leader or the system is a punishable offence in North Korea, so the guards were unlikely to react with equanimity in such an uncompromising climate.
The guards then checked Park’s passport and reported the event to the provincial office of the State Safety and Security Agency, who relayed it to headquarters. Officers from headquarters arrived within three days and took Park to Pyongyang.
They merely rebuked the guards for being over-zealous in their beating of Park. “I heard from soldiers that he was beaten so severely that he will need several months to recover,” said a Hoeryong resident who recently fled to China. [Chosun Ilbo]
The brutality of the guards is shocking, even somewhat surprising, even for North Korea. Ordinarily, one might expect North Korean military personnel to be disciplined and well trained on how to deal with foreigners. If this report is true, it is just a small example of how this system inculcates its subjects to brutalize each other, and with contempt for the civilized world. It is also a sad illustration of why non-violence will not change North Korea. Courage is not enough to resist and abolish this evil. The people cannot resist it with their bare hands.
There is also confirmation that Park won’t suffer alone for his choices. From the moment Robert Park crossed the Tumen River on Christmas, I knew that however good Park’s intentions, his mission was doomed to do more harm to others than good. Now, we have evidence that that is in fact so:
A North Korean defector with South Korean citizenship identified only as Kim has been arrested in China for helping an evangelical activist cross into North Korea in an eye-catching stunt to call for human rights there.
“We’ve confirmed through various channels that Kim, who was staying at a hideout in Yanji, Jilin Province, was arrested by Chinese police last Friday,” Kim Sung-min, the head of defector-run station Free North Korea Radio, said Sunday,
Kim was reportedly arrested in possession of video footage of Robert Park’s Christmas Eve crossing of the frozen Duman (or Tumen) River, which marks China’s border with the North. [Chosun Ilbo]
Kim Sung-min, head of the Seoul-based Radio Free North Korea, told Yonhap News Agency that a person identified only by his family name of Kim was arrested Friday by Chinese police at his hiding place in the city of Yanji. [Yonhap]
I doubt we’ve seen the last of the ill effects of what Robert Park has done. One wonders what names and places this defector will now reveal to his Chinese or North Korean interrogators, or what safe houses will have to be abandoned for fear that they’ve been compromised. How many refugees could this man who was arrested have led to safety? How much food could he have helped smuggle in? We have not yet touched on the question of ransom. Park was sincere when he said that he didn’t want his government to ransom him out and help legitimize or perpetuate the very evils he wanted to protest. But when a citizen of the United States is held in unjust captivity in a foreign country, his government is obligated to help him. Park doesn’t have the power to waive that duty.
Like many of you here, my friend Claudia Rosett differs, respectfully, with my views when she writes:
It is now almost three weeks since Park vanished into the shadows of North Korea. As he expected, he was seized by North Korean authorities. Among advocates of human rights for North Korea, his extraordinary act has sparked a debate over whether he was brave, foolish or crazy, and whether there can be any good reason for a man to walk deliberately into the blood-stained grip of Kim Jong-il’s regime.
But Park made his aims and requests quite clear. Before he crossed that frozen river, he gave an interview to Reuters, asking that it be held until he was in North Korea. In that interview, which Reuters released shortly after he had crossed over, Park spelled out “I do not want to be released. I don’t want President Obama to come and pay to get me out. What he wanted, he said, is for “the North Korean people to be free. Until the concentration camps are liberated, I do not want to come out. If I have to die with them, I will.
Those were not words of madness, but of passion for good over evil. Park knew what he was walking into. [Claudia Rosett, Forbes]
Rosett’s criticism rings particularly true when she strikes at the complete failure of international institutions to address any of the evils going on in North Korea:
Where in global officialdom has there been serious will and a true campaign to end these horrors? American soldiers are willing to fight and die for freedom, but not since the halt of the Korean War in 1953 have America and its allies actually done battle to try to rid the Korean peninsula of the North’s totalitarian regime. Neither has any international bureaucracy found the methods or backbone to force the Pyongyang regime to open its prisons or free its people. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, for instance, runs a comfortable, well guarded office in Beijing, where in keeping with the wishes of China’s government, the UNHCR politely refrains from offering haven to desperate and hunted North Korean refugees. The International Committee of the Red Cross pays court to Kim, in order to have access to some parts of his domain. But if any ICRC delegates have visited Kim’s gulag, they have not managed to leak the memo.
Robert Park, “American citizen,” looked into that heart of darkness, and walked toward it, calling for life and freedom for the 23 million people of North Korea ““ a message filled with the passions that are the soul of America itself.
Indeed, it is long past time to treat the institute led by Ban Ki Moon as irrelevant. Extraordinary means will be necessary to address this. But Park’s methods aren’t the ones that are going to effect change. There is much in what Ms. Rosett says that I agree with. There may be much that you disagree with, though I ask that if you express that, please be nice. I’m invited to her house this week.
None of this changes the fact that Robert Park is guilty of no crime and was unjustly beaten and imprisoned by a regime so brutal and intolerant that it would do so for no greater “crime” than the peaceful submission of a petition to its tyrant. The regime’s brutality toward Robert Park is just one more injustice added to many. I had hoped that the North Koreans would simply turn Park around at the border, but that didn’t happen, and it worries me what Robert Park, a man who meant the best for others, is now enduring. And as much as I worry about Park, I worry even more about those endangered by his actions.