I believe Sandy will be interested in reading this:
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200511/200511210026.html
The Victims Turn Accomplices by Kim Dae-joong
The core of the Roh Moo-hyun administration consists of people who protested loudly at human rights abuses in the decades when South Korea was a desert in that regard. Many young men and women in those days were beaten during demonstrations, arrested while escaping, some tortured, and a few of them died.
That earned the survivors the decoration they carry on their chests today. The prime minister and other leaders of the administration brag about it now, as who should say, "Where were you when we languished in prison?" and, "Who are you to criticize, when you never said a word then?" What underpins their hold on power today is a national sense that they should be rewarded for the courage with which they protested against the suppression of human rights and fought against the dogmatism and undemocratic practices of the oppressor.
If they gained power, many citizens believed, they would display an unusual sense of mission to improve and safeguard human rights. The government is betraying that trust. It is blind, dumb and speechless to the human rights situation in North Korea. Buoyed by the flow of the times and an awakened civic consciousness, human rights in the South are progressing toward maturity. Needless to say, we still have blind spots in human rights, not least in the case of migrant workers, but awareness of that issue, too, is slowly filtering through our institutions.
We could therefore afford to focus on the appalling plight of our 23 million brethren in the North. For some reason, however, the government stoops to ignoring the human rights situation in the North and reading the faces of Kim Jong-il and his henchmen instead. Last week, it miserably abstained from voting on a UN resolution calling for an inquiry into human rights abuses in the North. Thus the victims of human rights abuses here have turned into accomplices of rights abuses in the North.
Why? Government officials explain they have no choice but to work for improvement of human rights within the general framework of the policy toward North Korea. What is the substance of that policy, and who is it for? Is it for the Kim Jong-il regime? Is it for the Roh administration? If neither, is it for unification? Or for the resolution of the North Korean nuclear problem? The basis of our stance to the North, surely, is to benefit our brethren there. What on earth can be more important than preventing them from being dressed in rags, hungry, beaten and executed?
The ruling party also says it prefers “gradual improvement" to applying pressure right away. They should know from their own experience that gradual improvement in human rights is impossible. There is not a single example in the world where a dictatorship has gradually improved its human rights record and survived. Dictatorships are well aware that once they improve human rights, their powers will be gone. Doesn't the emergence of the Roh administration itself testify to that? The logic is based on a fiction.
Could there be another reason? Perhaps the government has an ulterior motive, hoping for a political gift from the Kim Jong-il regime, such as another inter-Korean summit. They should know that a political handout thus obtained will only plunge the North Koreans into further misery by cementing the regime’s stranglehold. Indeed, it is possible that some want to help the regime survive at any cost, whether the people survive or perish.
The greatest moral crime of the abstention is that it crushes any nascent resistance forces in the North. The desperate efforts of the North Koreans to recover the minimum rights to subsistence and living free from the threat of incarceration in concentration camps and public execution have been dealt a terrible blow by Seoul’s abstention. It calls the very legitimacy of the Roh government into question.
I quote again this urgent appeal from a North Korean defector: "Aid given by South Korea and many relief organizations helps the North Koreans and hence the Kim Jong-il regime survive. In a sense, the aid can be likened to a drug that keeps a dying patient alive. But if the death of North Koreans today can bring a more humane existence for the North Koreans of tomorrow, it would be wiser to stop administering the drug today.”
(englishnews@chosun.com )
