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Category: Human Rights

August 23, 2006

An Open Letter to Ambassador Lee Tae-Shik on the 169 Refugees Held in Thailand

[Update: Foreign Minister Ban Ki Moon is promising to take “appropriate measures,” which is encouraging in a vague sort of way. Foreign diplomats also sound optimistic. I infer that this was an underground railroad operation, and get the distinct idea that it was betrayed from within, as I also suspect in the case of a previous operation in Laos. Note also that various reports count as many as 179 refugees, most of them women and kids. Separately, Yonhap reports a...

Categories "United" Nations/Activism/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Refugees
August 22, 2006

NK Freedom Watch, No. 5

Courtesy of Freedom House (with a hat tip to the staff there), here. Portions of this issue read like an indictment, which mainly makes it painfully obvious how far away we are from seeing a real one. The same methods of execution are applied to political criminals and economic criminals. When the death warrant is issued for a criminal, he is immediately cut off from all food supplies and his arms and legs are broken at the joints so that...

Categories Activism/Europe/Human Rights/Washington Views
August 10, 2006

TKL Exclusive: What Hyde Will Tell Roh

Via a reliable source I can’t name, I now have some specifics on just how pretty this won’t be. Among Hyde’s expected talking points for his visit to Korea this week are the following. Disclaimer — this is a paraphrase of a paraphrase: * You want operational control of all forces during wartime. How is that going to work? Will there be a U.S. general and a Korean general commanding the entire force jointly or two forces separately? Either way,...

Categories An Alliance?/Appeasement/China & Korea/Human Rights/Korean Society/NK Economics/Refugees/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
August 8, 2006

More Details on the Washington Debut of ‘Yoduk Story’

[Previous] Via the Chosun Ilbo: A Korean musical about human rights abuses in North Korea’s notorious Yoduk concentration camp will be staged at the National Theater in Washington D.C. Producers of “Yoduk Story” said Monday the musical will debut there on Sept. 21. The 165-year old National Theater is right on Pennsylvania Avenue, about 100 m from the White House, and is one of the national symbols. There will be 10 shows until Oct. 1 at the theater. Suzanne Scholte,...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/Korean Society/The Camps
July 28, 2006

Journalistic Absurdity of the Day

Yonhap News gives us this head-scratcher in the course of reporting on North Korea’s new demand for its missile launches not to affect the Kaesong Industrial Complex: Nevertheless, the joint industrial complex has been a burden for the South Korean government as there are concerns that a portion of the wages paid to North Korean workers there could be used to develop missiles. (emphasis mine) I’m in awe. Those people labor long hours in sweatshops for a pittance and still...

Categories Appeasement/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/Humor/Satire/NK Economics/Uncategorized/WMD
July 27, 2006

How a Party Rooted in Authoritarianism Can Grow a Conscience

Cardinal Kim Soo-Hwan seems to have very little use for President Roh Moo-Hyun and Unifiction Minister Lee Jong-Seok, and he’ll get neither an argument nor any points for originality from me there. The most important words he spoke were for the Korean right, which has been much too busy boycotting the National Assembly to use its seats there to propose a better direction for Korea. I hope the GNP (and everyone else) heeds the Cardinal’s words: Cardinal Kim also urged...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/Korean Politics/Korean Society
July 27, 2006

V.P. Cheney Speaks at Korean War Memorial

[Thanks to a reader for forwarding; this is an excerpt.] In the course of the struggle, our good ally, South Korea, sustained horrendous losses, both military and civilian, at the hands of the communist forces. Yet so much of the suffering that came to South Koreans in that period of war has been the daily experience of their brothers and sisters in the North for the more than 50 years since. North Korea is a scene of merciless repression, chronic...

Categories Human Rights/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
July 27, 2006

LiNK Update

Lot of great stuff over at the LiNK site, including a video. Keep scrolling. If you live in Seoul, Andy Jackson is asking for passing along LiNK’s request for volunteers to teach English to North Korean refugees (I use the term intentionally). It’s easy to miss the potential importance of this, but English is key to connecting North Koreans to the greater world and allowing them to describe their experiences in their own words.

Categories Activism/Human Rights/Refugees
July 25, 2006

China Frees the Shenyang Three, But Keeps Feeding the Dear Leader

They’re on their way to America now. You will recall that these refugees originally entered the South Korean Consulate, then overpowered a guard, jumped a wall, and entered the U.S. Consulate next door. I don’t necessarily see this as a sign that Chinese-North Korean relations are cooling, by the way. With the refugees safely inside an American Consulate, the Chinese and the Americans alike really had no choice but to allow this at some appropriate time. And although there are...

Categories China/China & Korea/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Refugees
July 19, 2006

An Image I’ll Never Shake

… the head of a murdered child, laid out in a field in a North Korean village, with residents brought down to see if anyone knew whose child this had been. Like twelve other wandering, homeless children before him, he had been lured into one of the last remaining restaurants in the starving district. Once the owner lured the children in, she would bathe them, and then strangle them. And butcher them. And then, she would sell their flesh to...

Categories Activism/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Washington Views
July 18, 2006

Congratulations

… to GNP Assemblyman Hwang Woo-Yea, who has become the new General Secretary of the party. Despite the Soviet-sounding title, Assemblyman Hwang has supported human rights for the North Korean people since the peak of the UniFiction in 2000. He is also a leader in an international, interparliamentary committee to promote human rights in the North. If Kim Moon-Soo (1, 2) is the movement’s populist face, Hwang, a former judge, is its diplomat.

Categories Human Rights/Korean Politics
July 11, 2006

Tongsun Park Trial Update

Today, Claudia Rosett reports from the courtroom that Park was picking up the tab for Maurice Strong’s private New York office. And that matters, why? Strong, for example, served in a public capacity in 1996 as a top adviser to former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then from 1997-2005 as a special adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan. With the rank of under-secretary-general, Strong orchestrated Annan’s 1997 reorganization of the U.N. Secretariat, stayed on as a top adviser, and from 2003-2005 became...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/U.S. Law
July 10, 2006

Leaked British Intelligence Report Accuses North Korea of Biowar Experiments on Infants

“Hundreds of prisoners die there each week, the victims of biological or chemical experiments to test out [chemical and biological] weapons for North Korea’s CBW arsenal,” claims an MI6 report. In one intelligence file is the allegation that newborn babies are taken from their mothers and injected with biological agents or given injections of chemicals that blister the skin, leaving huge keloids, the sores seen on the bodies of Hiroshima victims. Caveat: I’m lukewarm on WorldNetDaily as a source, but...

Categories Human Rights/North Korea/The Camps
July 7, 2006

The Wrong Kind of Attention

[Update: You MUST read this IHT op-ed by Grace Kang and David Scheffer, on raising the issue of prosecuting Kim Jong Il for crimes against humanity. I tend to agree that this would go nowhere in the U.N., which (and this is me talking now) would be a perfect demonstration of the institution’s worthless as a global law-giver. Thanks to a commenter.] Two and a half years ago, I left the Army and started a blog called OneFreeKorea to bring...

Categories Activism/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights
July 2, 2006

Decisions, Decisions: Impose an Arms Embargo on North Korea

“At least since 2000 when we began providing assistance to the North, no one there has been starving to death. ““ UniFiction Minister Lee Jong-Seok, May 2, 2006 This week, the World Food Program is reporting what ought to surprise no one — that after the North Korean government forced it to cut back its feeding operations from one that fed 6.5 million people to one that feeds just 1.2 million — millions are going hungry as a result. We’ve...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/NK Military
June 29, 2006

NK Freedom Watch, Issue 4

… courtesy of Freedom House. This issue discusses Europe’s increasing concern for the North Korean people, but focuses on human trafficking. Their definition of human trafficking doesn’t just involve the movement of enslaved people, but also involves the movement of things enslaved people are forced to make. I particularly recommend this issue to those interested in such issues as Kaesong and other exports from the North; this issue contains accounts of gulag inmates being made to produce products for export.

Categories Activism/Europe/Human Rights/Human Trafficking