 |
 |
Tuesday, May 04, 2004 |
AMERICANS, INTERNATIONALS, RALLY FOR NORTH KOREAN HUMAN RIGHTS
North Korea Freedom Day in D.C. draws thousand-plus supporters
Special to ASSIST by John Lindner
WASHINGTON, DC (ANS) -- Kim Jong-Il, who killed 3 million of his own people, should kill himself!” shouted Dr. Kim Hyun-Uk, former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee for the South Korean Parliament.
 The crowd of over a thousand gathered on the West lawn of the Capitol Wednesday, April 28, roared agreement. Passions ran strong throughout the North Korea Freedom Day event on Wednesday, April 28. All came to champion the cause of the 23 million North Korean people held hostage by the ideologue dictator, Kim Jong-Il. (Pictured: North Korea defectors waive signs at the Holocaust Museum urging human rights action for suffering North Korean people).
Nearly half the crowd were North Korean escapees, South Koreans, or ethnic Korean Americans. Other participants included non-Korean Americans and Japanese, who came to protest the North Korean abduction of 15 Japanese citizens since the late 1970s. In fact, Sandy Rios, leader of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, said their event brought together the largest gathering of North Korean defectors ever.
One of the key speakers was Soon Ok Lee, the North Korean government procurer of provisions who was thrown in jail on false charges when she refused to give a greedy government official more than his proper allowance.
While in prison she watched in horror as hardened jailers, angered that Christian prisoners would not deny their faith when commanded to do so, ordered molten metal poured over the praying believers. After serving her term, Soon was released only to learn that her husband had deserted her. She managed to escape to South Korea where she found Christ and later wrote her testimony in a book, Eyes of the Tailless Animals: Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman.
With the disastrous train explosion in Ryongchon, North Korea just six days before the rally, An Hyuk, North Korean defector and co-founder of the Democracy Network Against the North Korean Gulag, challenged North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il to “open his roadways and airways” to receive help from overseas for the train disaster victims. Dr. Norbert Vollertsen, the German doctor who went inside North Korea a few years ago to see the suffering of the people firsthand, had reported earlier the North Korean regime had blocked land routes and direct medical aid from South Korea.
According to Dr. Chung Byung-Ho, Professor of Anthropology at Hanyang University in South Korea, the entire population of North Korea suffers from under nutrition. He said that the average North Korean seven-year-old child was about six inches shorter than the typical South Korean child of the same age. He and others claimed that two-to-three million people had died in North Korea from starvation and government brutality in recent years.
All of this occurred, according to Dr. Kim Hyun-Uk, former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee for the South Korean Parliament, while Kim Jong-Il spent the equivalent of $3.5 million to surreptitiously gather technical information from Pakistan to build nuclear bombs. Dr. Kim also protested his own country’s failure to advocate human rights for North Koreans, noting that South Korea failed to vote on the human rights resolution presented before the U.N. in Geneva. (Pictured: Ahn Hyok, co-founder, Democracy Network Against the North Korean Gulag and Rev. Thorn Wee Myung, Senior Pastor, Jerusalem Presbyterian Church (Maryland) chant “Free North Korea” before media at a demonstration at the Holocaust Museum).
The purpose of the gathering, according to Suzanne Scholte, organizer of the event, was to focus attention on the humanitarian plight of North Korea’s 23 million people, rather than the nuclear agenda that had been stressed in the media. Particular attention was given to those who risk their lives seeking escape through China. Those caught by Chinese police are returned to North Korea where they are treated as defectors and are most likely killed or worked to death in prison camps, referred to as “The Hidden Gulag” by the U.S.
Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a non-government organization. Scholte is leader of the Defense Forum Foundation that has worked since 1997 to aid North Korean defectors and one of the co-founders of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, sponsor of the event. The NKFC is a consortium of about two-dozen human rights organizations, including Jubilee Campaign, Prison Fellowship, American Family Association, National Association of Evangelicals, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, Salvation Army, and a half-dozen organizations oriented specifically to bring help to the suffering people of North Korea.
After the rally many participants gathered in teams to lobby key representatives in Congress about passing the North Korea Human Rights Act of 2004. Among other things, it will provide funds for non-profit organizations to aid North Koreans, and make it easier for North Korea escapees to come to the U.S. as refugees. One team reported that that representatives in Congress it visited were well informed and even enthusiastic about the bill. At the same time one aide advised that persistent letters and phone calls from concerned citizens help keep them alert to special needs such as this.
At the same time, NK defectors were presenting their testimonies before the House International Relations Committee. The meeting was expected to start at 1 o’clock and last an hour, but the Congressmen were so interested in what was happening and asked so many questions that the hearing lasted until 6:30, according to Scholte. “The day was a smashing success,” she said.
About 300 participants viewed “Seoul Train,” a film-in-progress by Incite Productions www.seoultrain.com showing clandestine footage of actual escape efforts of North Korean families through China. The miracle that allowed some footage to be viewed is that one of the Chinese officers who caught a family trying to escape later became a Christian and turned the confiscated footage over to South Korean Christians.
More information on the North Korea Freedom Coalition and the North Korea Human Rights Act of 2004 is available at www.nkfreedon.org.
. 9:31:33 AM 
|
|
© 2004 Radio Free China
Last Update: 6/1/2004; 10:51:48 AM
|
|
|
