How Can We Stop Today’s Endless Atrocities Being Committed Against the Korean People?
Suzanne Scholte
Seoul Peace Prize Laureate 2008
This past week was the 50th anniversary of Captive Nation’s Week, which was first established in 1959, to recognize the nations whose people are held “captive” under communism. Communism is now responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people – and today in North Korea millions have perished just within the last decade and hundreds more will die this week in political prison camps, detentions centers, because of starvation and lack of medical care and through public executions - innocent men, women, and children.
How can the government of South Korea stop the rising death toll in North Korea? South Korea needs to send a powerful signal to those committing crimes against the Korean people by convening a Tribunal of respected South Korean judges and legal experts to gather evidence and begin to prosecute those responsible. Because North Koreans are citizens of the Republic of Korea under Article III of their constitution, North Koreans have standing in Korean courts. Those committing these heinous acts on behalf of the Kim Jong-il regime must be put on notice that one day they will be held accountable and punished. For example: the Musan detention center guard who beat and crippled Bang Mi Sun who had been sent there as punishment because she had fled to China to feed her starving children; the political prison camp guards at Camp No. 14 who tortured Shin Dong Hyok when he was just fourteen years old because he could not explain why his mother had tried to escape; and the North Korean border guards who beat to death the teenage daughter of Ko Mae Hwa and the North Korean security police who killed her father because she worked for Free North Korea Radio – all must be held accountable for their actions.
Furthermore, people like Kim Young Soon – a Yoduk survivor who lost her father, mother, son, and daughter – may be able to have some peace in her life if she knows that her government will pursue those who destroyed her family when she was sent to Yoduk simply for knowing Kim Jong-il’s first wife. Working with the group “Democracy Network Against the North Korean Gulag” and the survivors of these camps, the tribunal can collect the names and get sketches of the faces of the perpetrators in these camps who have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Koreans.
Now is a crucial time to send this signal because North Koreans are becoming increasingly aware of the true conditions outside their “paradise.” Kim Jong-il’s days are numbered and he can no longer isolate and subjugate the North Korean people. South Korea must be ready for that day of reckoning when the atrocities of this regime become known to the world.
After giving a speech recently, I was approached by a Korean American who fled his North Korean hometown of Hamhung as child with the U.S. Army in 1950 when the Chinese invaded. His father had told him to go with the retreating U.S. Army.
This Korean American never saw his family again because the Americans never came back to North Korea as his father predicted. Regarding South Korea, he told me bitterly: “We North Koreans would never had abandoned our South Korean brothers and sisters if the Communist had taken them over and we had been free.”
His statement reminds us that reunification will not just come with the end of communism in the North. Convening a Tribunal is a critical step for South Korea to stem the atrocities being committed against the Korean people now, and to begin the process of reconciliation and healing that will start with reunification.
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KOREAN TRANSLATION (ORIGINAL) VERSION HERE:
http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2009/07/29/2009072901481.html
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