To: 49thMIMOMander who wrote (17542 ) 3/8/2003 9:17:32 PM From: KLP Read Replies (1) | Respond to Jimmy Carter-Nobel Peace Prize-North Korea -Sun-Shine and Frog in a Well...and Human Rights that EVERYONE in the world has ignored for the last 50+ years....www2.gol.com The North Korea Advisory Group, a group of House staffers on the Majority side, submitted a report to the Speaker in the fall of 1999 where they drew the conclusion that North Korea has "the worst human rights record in the world." While one might point, after the events of September 11th, to the Taleban regime in Afghanistan as the world's premier human rights abuser, the Pyongyang regime certainly remains unsurpassed in duration -- over fifty years since at least 1948 -- in subjecting its people and those who fell into its control to the most horrendous forms of abuse. The 2000 State Department report, unlike some of its predecessors, gives detailed documentation of reports of the extensiveness and variety of these abuses. It is the report of approximately two hundred thousand North Korean political prisoners detained in labor camps. That, more or less, represents one percent of North Korea's population of twenty-two to twenty-four million people. Think about it. One out of one hundred, the equivalent of three million Americans interned. Locked in camps where, according to escapees, people are regularly starved, tortured and beaten, crushed with rocks, strung up on wire, shot in the head. Their only crime is upholding a political or religious belief that even slightly questions the unswerving, unthinking loyalty demanded by a megalomaniac regime. Has anyone of the world leaders now engaged in negotiating sessions or normalization talks with Pyongyang even raised the existence of these Korean gulags, these DPRK Dachaus -- not to mention the need for their abolition? Australia and Canada are nations with roughly the same populations as North Korea. What if two hundred thousand Australians were interned in such camps? Would the world be so silent? When Chun Doo Hwan, labeled in Korean history as "the butcher of Kwangju," interned a few thousand students and intellectuals in "re-education camps" for a few months following the events of May 1980, there was a hew and cry from human rights leaders in Korea, in Asia, and throughout the world. I remember. I was then living in Seoul. I had a Korean friend who was interned that summer. And I can tell you this: Whatever Chun Doo Hwan did to his own people -- and I do not in any way condone it -- his actions cannot begin to compare with what the Kim Jong Il regime did and continues to do every day. Are we to wait, as silent spectators, as with the "Killing Fields of Cambodia," until regime collapse reveals the gruesome extent of the atrocities, or are we to begin to speak up now as part of our dialogue with the North Koreans? Let the sun shine in.
