Thursday, Oct. 30, 2003 | 8:14 a.m.
APPARENTLY THE BEST FRIENDS North Korea's Kim Jong Il has in the free world are a growing number of South Koreans and their leaders. Last Sunday in this column I quoted from "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps." The brutality of the North Korean government evidently shocked some Americans, but this situation has been known in South Korea for many years. Despite this knowledge, many peace-at-any-cost South Koreans want to trade and cooperate with their deadly neighbors to the north.
Is this prevailing attitude in South Korea because of fear or brotherly love? Probably it is the result of expecting the United States to bail them out if Kim's rockets and army strike them. The suggestion that U.S. troops be moved farther south from the DMZ and Seoul resulted in screams of agony from both South Korea and North Korea. The South Koreans want our troops to be the tripwire that will make us spring into action if they are attacked. The North Koreans view the move south by U.S. troops as an indication we are going to bomb their army and nation into submission.
Young people in the streets of Seoul carrying signs that say "Yankees Go Home" demonstrate both ignorance and arrogance. Many of them are willing to overlook the inhumanity of their neighbor's government and have little understanding of the pain, blood and money the U.S. has expended helping them become a free people.
Hwang Jang Yop, the former leader of North Korea's Workers Party and president of Kim Il Sung University, defected and has lived in South Korea for the past six years. His stories about the regime of North Korea have been well publicized in South Korea and now he comes to the U.S. South Koreans have expressed fear that he will encourage our country to make humanitarian demands on Kim's country.
Melanie Kirkpatrick, writing from Seoul in The Wall Street Journal, gives readers the following evaluation of the situation: "Most Koreans are well informed about the brutal realities of life in the North but prefer to look the other way. It's much pleasanter to contemplate reunification fantasies such as the one portrayed in a recent hit movie about a cross-border romance between a South Korean woman and a North Korean soldier. Last week's chilling report on the North Korean gulags made it into some South Korean papers but wasn't front-page news. Students demonstrated against Mr. Hwang's U.S. visit last week, protesting his anti-North Korea message.
"If the South Korean people seem indifferent to the plight of their brothers and sisters in the North, it's in large part because their political leaders remain silent. President Roh Moo Hyun was a human-rights lawyer before taking office earlier this year but human rights north of the DMZ is way down on his priority list. To his credit, Mr. Roh is allowing Mr. Hwang to visit the U.S. -- something his predecessor, Kim Dae Jung (another human-rights activist who lost his voice when it came to the human-rights horrors in the North) refused to permit for fear of angering Kim Jong Il."
While Hwang is in the U.S. his voice for human rights and condemnation of his former home should be heard by members of Congress. President George W. Bush already knows what is happening in the country governed by "evil." Can we trust such a government or trade with one as brutal as North Korea? According to the Los Angeles Times, Hwang told a group of South Korean legislators, "The key focus should be to remove Kim Jong Il's dictatorship. To give unconditional support to North Korea for the sake of peace while leaving the dictatorship alone would be an illusion."
David Hawk, in his expose of the North Korean hidden gulags, also stresses the need for human rights matters to be settled. Hawk wrote, "Neighboring and other nation-states face a series of interlocking and unresolved disputes with North Korea. These include extremely serious security issues revolving around North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile programs, and the conventional military face-off at the DMZ separating North and South Korea. These disputes, inevitably, also involve humanitarian issues, such as North Korea's continuing need for international food aid to keep renewed famine at bay, family-reunification visits between North and South Koreans, and accounting for South Korean and Japanese citizens previously kidnapped by North Korea."
Human rights becoming an accepted part of North Korean thinking is a long way down the road. This doesn't mean that the international community, including South Korea, should continue treating the brutality of Kim's government as acceptable or tolerable.
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