Escape from North Korea (29 page)

Congressman Ed Royce, a Republican from Orange County, California, was another early backer of the North Korean Human Rights Act. Royce is a longtime activist on behalf of North Korean refugees in China, North Koreans imprisoned in their country's gulag, and human rights issues overall. Royce attributes his interest in North Korea and other repressive regimes to his father, who was one of the American soldiers who liberated the Dachau concentration camp in Germany in 1945. The elder Royce had a camera with him and took photographs that have haunted the congressman since his boyhood. “My brother and I opened my father's chest from World War II and found the pictures he had taken at Dachau,” Royce said. “It had a profound effect on me.” When he looks at photos of North Koreans today, he said, the people in the photos have
the same look in their eyes as those in his father's snapshots. “They reflect the same level of abuse.” In 2002, Congressman Royce held a Congressional hearing on the subject of human rights in North Korea. “I had a defector draw a map of one of the prison camps,” he said. The hearing set the stage for the legislation that Congress passed two years later.

From his perch at the Hudson Institute in Washington, Michael Horowitz was one of the loudest, most effective voices advocating passage of the legislation. Several senators initially were fearful that the proposed legislation was too strong, Horowitz said. They worried about antagonizing China and making North Korea even more recalcitrant than it already was. “Then the KCC held its first convention in California, and one thousand–plus pastors showed up,”
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Horowitz said. “The politicians got nervous.” It was an election year, and it looked like Korean-Americans were finally waking up to their potential political clout.

Passage of the Human Rights in North Korea Act was the Korean Church Coalition's finest hour, Horowitz said. Congressman Royce agrees that the Korean Church Coalition was helpful in winning support for the law. Pastors from three hundred churches came to Washington, where they made congressional visits and held rallies, he remembers. It was a kind of coming-out party for Korean-American activism in the nation's capital.

Since the passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act in 2004, it is hard to point to any political achievement on the part of the KCC or any other Korean-American organization. Royce cites South Korea's Sunshine Policy as one reason for Korean-Americans' inaction. Many Korean-Americans take their cue on North Korean affairs from the South Korean government, and the Sunshine Policy of engagement with Pyongyang, which was the South Korean government's policy from 1998 to 2008, effectively signaled that human rights didn't matter. The Sunshine Policy belied its name, Royce said. It shone “no light” on the North Korean gulag or on the everyday
brutality of life in North Korea. In Royce's words, the South Korean government “kept a lot of what was happening in North Korea in darkness.”
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In Michael Horowitz's view, individual Korean-Americans work hard on North Korean issues, but no one wants to get out in front. That is partly cultural, he argues. Koreans traditionally have a high regard for hierarchy, and they show great deference to elders. But such attitudes serve them poorly when it comes to the rough-and-tumble of American politics. In Horowitz's words, “Korean-American leaders think they have made progress when they get a photo-op with a political leader or a letter from a politician saying, ‘I feel your pain.' ”

It is notable that the go-to activist in Washington on the issue of human rights for North Koreans is not of Korean ancestry. She is Suzanne Scholte, who, as her name suggests, is European-American. Scholte has been promoting awareness of North Korean issues since the mid-1990s. In 1996, she initiated a program to bring North Korean refugees to the United States to speak out about the North Korean regime. The visitors have ranged from high-ranking defectors to average citizens from all walks of life. They have included survivors of the political prisons, professors, engineers, military leaders, state security agents, and government workers. She has organized speakers for numerous Congressional hearings.

In 2004, Scholte organized the first North Korea Freedom Day in Washington, D.C. One thousand people gathered on the steps of the Capitol to rally in support of human rights for North Koreans. North Korea Freedom Day expanded to an annual North Korea Freedom Week, when activists, scholars, politicians, and refugees come together in Washington or Seoul for a week of information gathering, networking, and public outreach. Scholte is a familiar figure outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington, where she has led protests against China's mistreatment of North Korean refugees. In 2011, when President Hu Jintao's motorcade pulled up at the White
House for a state dinner, he was greeted by protestors organized by Scholte who were rallying at Lafayette Park. The demonstrators carried a coffin to symbolize the North Koreans who died when China repatriated them.

The South Korean government recognized Scholte's activism in 2008 with the Seoul Peace Prize, an honor that also has gone to Czech President Vaclav Havel, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, and other international figures. The citation read: “At a time when countries are purposely neglecting the human rights conditions in North Korea for their political interests, Scholte has taken the lead in raising awareness of the miserable plight of North Korean refugees and encouraged the refugees who are seeking freedom.”
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After the Holocaust, Jews vowed, never again. American Jews kept that promise during the Cold War, advocating in Washington, D.C., on behalf of persecuted Jews in the Soviet Union and demanding that Moscow allow Jews to exit the country.

This example is not lost on the second and third generations of Korean-Americans. These young people increasingly are taking up the issue of North Korean human rights and beginning to organize on campuses and elsewhere. The U.S.-born activists were raised on American values of personal liberty and respect for the rule of law. “Things are changing now, especially among younger Korean-Americans.” Congressman Royce said. “They look at the Jewish community and see what it was able to accomplish during the Cold War.”

There is one lesson in particular from that era that Korean-American activists would be smart to emulate. The movement to free Soviet Jews began as a grassroots effort far removed from the elites of Jewish society. It started in 1963 not with national Jewish leaders or even with rabbis. Instead, it began with a petition organized by two Jewish laymen in Cleveland, Ohio. The men were looking for ways
to call attention to the deteriorating plight of Soviet Jews. In time, the struggle to help Soviet Jews attracted supporters from every part of Jewish life—religious leaders, politicians, businessmen. But the salient fact is that it began with ordinary citizens who were outraged enough to take action.
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This kind of bottom-up approach will not come naturally to Korean-Americans brought up in a culture that reveres age and experience.

Korean-Americans face the challenge, too, of boosting awareness of the plight of North Koreans among fellow Americans of many different ancestries. George W. Bush used the bully pulpit of the American presidency to draw attention to the refugee crisis in China. He met with North Korean refugees several times during his term in office. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama had their picture taken with Lee Ae-ran the first North Korean woman to earn a Ph.D. in South Korea. Presidents Bush and Obama both have raised the refugee issue with their Chinese counterparts.

But North Korea does not have the status of an “Asian Darfur,” as more than one activist has ruefully pointed out. Darfur activists have film star Mia Farrow as their spokeswoman; the free Tibet movement has actor Richard Gere. No celebrity has stepped forward as a champion for the North Koreans.

Washington activist Michael Horowitz has a suggestion for how to begin to educate Americans about what is happening in North Korea. Every Korean-American church, he says, should place a sign on its front lawn that quotes the Book of Exodus:
Let My People Go
.

BE THE VOICE

A
ngel Chung Cutno stood on the stage of the theater at the University of Connecticut's student union and recounted the story of how she became an advocate on behalf of North Korean escapees. She has told the story countless times at college campuses up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

With her halo of curly hair and luminous brown eyes that angle upward, Angel cuts a striking figure. She is biracial, the daughter of a South Korean woman and African-American man. Her parents met in the 1980s when her father was in the Army, one of thirty thousand American soldiers stationed in South Korea. She grew up in Louisiana. In college she became involved in North Korean human rights issues. Her commitment is demonstrated by the tattoo she wears on the inside of her left wrist. It is the red and blue flag of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Above the flag are tattooed the words, “Be the Voice.”
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Angel represents a new generation of Korean-American activists. They are angry, fervent, and plainspoken. Unlike their immigrant parents and grandparents, they want to address the issue of North Korean abuses head-on. Nor do they have the regional prejudices and other cultural baggage that afflict the older generation. This younger cohort, now in their twenties and thirties, is outraged and driven. Kevin Park, a Korean-American from Seattle who became an activist on North Korea when he was a student at Pepperdine University, says older Korean-Americans have chastised him: You're “wasting your time,” they say. The younger generation is different. “I've never met a second-generation Korean-American who said, ‘I don't care about it,' ” Park states.
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Raising awareness is a primary goal, and student activists are doing so on a growing number of campuses, where North Korea is becoming an increasingly popular concern. It is not up there yet with Darfur and Tibet as campus causes, but events about North Korea are turning up with increasing frequency on bulletin boards in student unions. The awareness campaigns aim to increase student understanding of life in North Korea and the atrocities that the Kim family regime is committing against the North Korean people. Many American students are ignorant about North Korea's totalitarian system. Their knowledge of the country may not go beyond
Team America
, the cult comedy film that lampoons Kim Jong Il, the easily lampoonable late dictator.

Kim Ju-song, an alias for a high-ranking North Korean military defector, spoke at a student forum at Yale University. He opened his remarks by imploring his listeners to shed their preconceptions. North Korea is nothing like anything any American student has experienced, he told them. “If you do not abandon your knowledge of the place where you are living right now, if you do not abandon your way of thinking, you will not be able to understand how North Korea works,” he said. “I have visited a lot of countries. There is no
country in the world that is like North Korea. The regime controls and represses its people.”

When a Yalie asked the defector what his trial had been like in North Korea before he was sent to jail, the defector looked at him as if he were crazy. There was no trial, he told the student. That's not the way the system works in North Korea. “You need to think outside of the system you grew up with here,” he repeated. “It's different in North Korea. If the government wants to arrest you, it will.” The reason Kim Ju-song was able to make the decision to leave North Korea, he said, was that he was privy to information about what life was like outside his country. He knew that an alternative existed.
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At the University of Connecticut gathering, Angel picked up a microphone and explained to the assembled students how she had become the voice of the voiceless North Koreans. By telling her personal story, she hoped to encourage other young people to support the same cause. “I'm from New Orleans,” she began. “I went to Louisiana State University. In the summer of 2008, I worked in Seoul at a school for refugees.”