Aug 21, 2010

A New Hope for Human Rights in North Korea?

Remarks by Carl Gershman, President of the National Endowment for Democracy at the 10th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees

Toronto, Canada

I want to begin by thanking HanVoice for hosting this 10th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees.  This is the first time we are meeting on the continent of North America, and so it’s also the first time that I have not had to cross an ocean to take part in this important annual gathering.  I’m grateful for the convenience, of course, but I appreciate far more the fact that we are meeting in Canada, which has been a consistent and immensely respected defender of human rights throughout the world for many decades.  It was a Canadian legal scholar, John Peters Humphrey, who was the principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Today the tradition of Canadian leadership on human rights is being carried forward by such world-renowned figures as Louise Arbour, who was the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian Justice Minister who has been counsel to Nelson Mandela and many other courageous prisoners of conscience.

I also want to congratulate the Citizens Alliance for North Korean Human Rights and its leader Benjamin Yoon, for whom this 10th conference is a significant milestone.  When the first meeting was held in December 1999, the terrible suffering of the people of North Korea was hidden from the world behind an impenetrable wall of total silence.  Today there is a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in North Korea – and we congratulate Vitit Muntarbhorn for his tremendous contribution in that role – and numerous reports have been issued on the prison camp system and other horrendous abuses.  This is due in no small measure to the light of truth that Rev. Yoon and the Citizens’ Alliance have shined on the dark landscape of North Korea.

These conferences have served many important purposes.  They bring together many of the key people from around the world who are working on the issue of human rights in North Korea.  They provide a public platform to air the critical issues and to hear testimony from victims and witnesses.  They provide a forum for strategizing together about the major challenges we face in the period ahead.  They enable us to broaden the coalition of support by meeting in different countries – first in South Korea and Japan, then in the Czech Republic, Poland, Norway, the United Kingdom, and Australia, and now in Canada.  Not least, they have provided an occasion to identify new targets of opportunity where international support should be directed.

It’s this last point that I wish to address this morning.  Since we first met at the end of 1999, there have been many new developments that affect the struggle for human rights in North Korea, including the growing international awareness of the issue.  But none has been more important, in my view, than the steady growth of the number of defectors from North Korea living in South Korea.  Just a decade ago there were virtually no defectors at all, which is one of the reasons North Korea was so isolated from the outside world and so little was known about it.  Today they number some 20,000.  There are many reasons for this exodus – the famine that has forced people to flee in search of food, the increased porousness of the border with China, the slow erosion of the regime’s instruments of totalitarian control, and the breakdown of the information blockade.  Taken together, they have increased the incentives to leave North Korea while reducing, albeit still modestly, the impediments preventing such flight.

The result is that there is now in South Korea a substantial and steadily growing population of defectors, many of them still in their twenties and even younger, who have the potential to open up and change North Korea in ways that are highly effective, if not yet well understood or adequately supported by South Korea and the international community.  Already these defectors have established NGOs of various kinds, among them radio broadcasting operations that target North Korean elites as well as grassroots people; a magazine circulated in North Korea containing articles on culture and current events, many of them based on information gathered from inside the country; and even an incipient think tank connected to internal networks that is trying to encourage the development of a North Korean civil society.

Last February when I visited Seoul to attend a conference, I had a roundtable discussion with about twenty of these defectors, some of them young people who had developed a defector network linking college students on campuses throughout South Korea and encouraging them to become active in human rights work.    The leader of this network was a young man who received training in a Citizens’ Alliance program and is now working on a degree in international relations at Sokang University in Seoul.  He said he had been able to overcome his anger against the North Korean regime only  by channeling it into work for human rights; and that while he was tempted to leave school to devote himself full-time to human rights work, he had decided to finish his degree program so that he could set a good example for other defector students.  Another student was studying philosophy because he wanted to better understand how he could help North Korea make the transition from Juche ideology to democracy.  There were also two young women, one working on a degree in police administration so that she might help a new North Korea train police who would protect people and not oppress them; and another majoring in international relations so that she could learn more about democracy and human rights.

Also taking part in the roundtable were leaders of the think tank I just mentioned, called North Korea Intellectual Solidarity.  It produces a digital magazine sent into North Korea on flash-drives containing information that defectors have told them they wished they had when they were still living in North Korea.  There was also someone from a group called the Economic Association of North Korean Defectors who wants to give micro-loans to defectors to help them become entrepreneurs, and eventually to provide such loans to people inside North Korea.

The intellectual and operational capacity that is developing among North Korean defectors deserves recognition as a significant new asset in the struggle for human rights in North Korea.  There are many ways this new capacity can be nurtured and supported.  For example, as the defectors expand their networks inside North Korea, enabling them to gather more information about the society, they will need  help in developing their analytical and reporting capabilities so that they can use this information effectively to promote change. Sponsoring internships for the defectors with NGOs in new democracies is a way to satisfy their great hunger to learn more about the experience others have had in trying to build democracy after dictatorship.  Another priority is helping defectors develop their writing and communication skills.

International democracy assistance organizations are beginning to explore new ways to become involved.  For example, the Center for International Private Enterprise, one of the NED’s four core institutes, is planning to study the informal markets in North Korea, called Jangmadang, to learn how they function and how the participants in such markets can be given tailored educational materials on entrepreneurship and free markets.  The National Democratic Institute, another NED core group, is hoping to mentor defector activists by sharing with them the lessons it has learned in scores of countries undergoing democratic transition.  The European Union is providing support to defector radio broadcasting through Reporters without Borders, and a number of European countries are showing a new interest in providing help.  Hopefully this conference will spur Canada’s involvement as well.

Developing new ways to support change in North Korea is just one of the vital roles that defectors can play.  Of equal importance is their ability to function as a “bridge population” linking what are, after six decades of separation, enmity and suspicion, two profoundly different Korean societies.  So far South Koreans, with the exception of the Citizens’ Alliance and a few other far-sighted groups, have not seen the advantage of having a sector of the population with real access to North Korean society.  They have preferred to deal with North Korea  through official political contacts, such as those initiated as part of the Sunshine Policy, and costly economic experiments like the Kaesong Industrial Park.  But the defectors offer something different and potentially much more valuable – authentic people-to-people contacts that can end the isolation of the North Korean people and also enable South Koreans to overcome their own isolation from an alien Korean society that they may one day have to live with.  As a population acculturated to the South but with roots in the North, the defector community is an invaluable resource that can facilitate the eventual integration of the now destitute and closed society of the North into a dynamic, open, and united Korean peninsula. 

This is especially true of the so-called 1.5 generation of young defectors.  They are still malleable and open to new ideas.  They want to learn how people in South Korea and other countries respect and defend human rights and democracy, how political parties organize and campaign, how workers fight for their rights and entrepreneurs compete in the marketplace, how journalists report the news and NGOs educate, defend and give voice to civil society.  And they want the knowledge and professional skills they will need to become productive and participating citizens.  They are, in other words, a resource that needs to be developed by investing in their education and training, with the goal of producing what Andrei Lankov, the Russian scholar who himself grew up in a communist society, calls “the first generation of modern North Korean professionals.”  Having such a core of proficient and highly motivated professionals will be an indispensable asset when the time for the rebuilding of North Korea comes, as someday it surely will.  It is extremely important, therefore, that their potential role be factored into the unification process proposed last Sunday by President Lee Myung-bak, as well as into the assistance programs of Canada and other democracies.  It is extremely important, therefore, that their potential role be factored into the unification process proposed last Sunday by President Lee Myung-bak, as well as into the assistance programs of Canada and other democracies.

The fact that such people could have emerged out of the nightmare of North Korea is a small miracle.  It’s also a significant opportunity for liberalizing and ultimately liberating North Korea.  Given the human and security interests that are at stake, we would be foolish not to seize it.