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Interesting News in a Slow News Month

Two  pieces of interesting news.

First, there is now a way for people who are not in Seoul or Tongyeong to sign the petition to save Shin Suk Ja and her two daughters, and thus  maybe, just maybe, to close those dastardly prison camps that have been so comprehensively described right here in the past!

Second, I have made the full text of ‘NK People Speak, 2011’ available on the Daily NK database for those of you who cannot wait for the remaining interviews to appear one by one. Note though that  the original Korean had eleven interviews while the English book only has ten; number eleven will only appear in English on the main  web page.

4 Responses

  1. Good to see something going on at this blog while Joshua’s so busy.

    I’d like to ask — and I don’t mean this to be contrarian, critical, or discouraging — what do you/they expect to come from the Shin Sukja petition? I mean, what is the goal (not the eventual goal of their release but of the petition itself)? Is it to raise enough awareness for the State Department to take this up as an official issue, as the Japanese do with kidnap victims? What is the game plan?

    And thanks for the “NK People Speak” link. I’ll check that out a bit more when I have some time. Like Joshua, I’ve found myself to busy to blog lately, on many days at least.

  2. I think aims vary person to person, as you might expect. I’m sure Oh Kil Nam’s desire is to get his wife and children back, and who can blame him. In other quarters people see a chance to get North Korean human rights into the mainstream in the same way as the Megumi story did for Japan. At a minimum, others hope simply that by shining a spotlight on the two girls, Hye Won and Gye Won, the North Korean authorities will feel compelled to treat them relatively better than they might otherwise do. Think Pak Doo Ik.

    Either way, currently there is still a lot of apathy in South Korea, and nobody is suggesting that things have been revolutionized by the Shin Suk Ja story, either, but human beings work the same everywhere; for better or worse, a single story of a person we feel we know is worth 200,000 tragic stories presented in the form of statistics.

    In Korea, it is working to some extent, and I daresay that internationalizing it is not just beneficial for its own sake, it will also work to invigorate the South Korean situation anew. If there is one thing guaranteed to generate South Korean interest itself, it is international interest in a South Korean issue.

  3. “A North Korean in his 40s was shot dead in broad daylight near the Chinese town of Yanji along the banks of the Apnok or Yalu River that separates North Korea and China. Witnesses said shots rang out from across the river in North Korea. Five people who appeared to be Chinese security officers rushed toward the fallen man and surrounded him. They did not bother to tend to his wounds and simply looked around to see if anyone was watching and then disappeared. The man squirmed as he bled and eventually died.

    The shooting death was witnessed by Kim Yong-hwa of the activist group North Korea Refugees Human Rights Association, a former defector himself, who was with a team of KBS journalists on assignment at the Chinese-North Korean border. It was the first visual confirmation of a directive issued by the North Korean government to shoot any North Koreans spotted fleeing across the border to China.”

    http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/11/09/2011110901246.html

    Would be curious if any other readers had links to the KBS report, or other leads on this story.