Dec 10, 2009

Kim Seong-Min, founder of Free North Korea Radio, wins the 2009 Asia Democracy and Human Rights Award

NED President, Carl Gershman's Message of Congratulations on the Presentation of the 2009 Asia Democracy and Human Rights Award by The Taiwan Foundation for Democracy to Kim Seung-Min, Founder of Free North Korea Radio

I recently had a conversation with a friend about miracles: Should we believe in them and what exactly is a miracle in the first place?  I said that I thought a miracle is an occurrence that defies the laws of nature or human possibility in a way that affirms the existence of a higher being and restores our faith in mankind.  This led me to think of Kim Seung-Min, since who he is, what he does, the fact that he exists at all is a miracle.

Born in 1962, Kim grew up within the world’s most closed, oppressive, and inhuman political system.  Yet somehow, miraculously, he discovered the truth, survived the system, escaped from his captors, and is now working to liberate his people.

He is the son of a poet, which may offer a clue to understanding his unusual journey to freedom.  But otherwise he’s a conventional product of the North Korean system.  He trained as a teacher and spent ten years in the North Korean Army, for some of that time as a propaganda officer.  But somehow he came to understand that North Korea, like all totalitarian systems, was based on a lie.  “I found out,” he said later, that “North Korea was not the best socialist country in the world, but the most backward, most undemocratic country in the world.  It was a total shock.”

Disillusioned by this realization, Kim escaped to China in October 1996, shortly after the famine struck North Korea.  Arrested by the Chinese police and sent back to North Korea, he was tortured for eight days at a detention center in Onsung.  Somehow he escaped again in March 1997 by jumping off the train taking him to the Central Office of the National Security Agency in Pyongyang.  Two years later he arrived in South Korea determined, as he wrote in a personal testimony, “to become a freedom fighter.”  First he became the director of the North Korean Defectors Association set up to serve the small but growing community of escapees, and in April 2004 he launched Free North Korea Radio. 

His reason for doing so is instructive.  “It is important,” he has said, “to give bread and milk to the starving people in North Korea.  However, if we do not give them freedom and democracy at the same time, it would be like providing only for the animals.  Our radio program provides information about freedom and democracy for the North Korean people.”

Kim’s work, therefore, affirms the belief that North Koreans are human beings.  The fact that he could emerge from the prison of North Korean totalitarianism tells us that North Koreans are not the faceless automatons who are infamously displayed to the world in mass performances of synchronized acrobatics and flip-card mosaic animation.  They are individuals who have the capacity to think, a unique personality, a distinct identity, and an immortal soul.

Kim’s unlikely personal journey restores our faith in the indestructible character of human freedom.  It means that if the North Korean regime, with all its terror, could not extinguish the flame of freedom within Kim Seung Min, then it remains alive in the hearts of other North Koreans. It means that while they are now slaves, they may one day become free people.

The North Korean totalitarian system is eroding.  The people are gradually awakening from a long nightmare.  At some point, hopefully not too far in the future, their isolation will come to an end and they will be able to join the family of nations.  And that, too, will be a miracle, one that Kim Seung-Min is helping to make happen.  For that, he fully deserves the 2009 Asia Democracy and Human Rights Award, and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy is to be congratulated for recognizing him in this fine manner.