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U.S. President George W. Bush, meeting with North Korean defector and Chosun Ilbo journalist Kang Chol-hwan on Tuesday, drew attention to North Korea¡¯s human rights abuses and asked: "Why are South Koreans not enraged about human rights abuses in the North?" That Bush, after reading Kang's memoir "The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag," invited its author to the White House may have been an attempt to show his concern for North Korea's human rights record and his determination to improve it.
The meeting inevitably invites comparison with our own country¡¯s approach. Why has the Korean president never invited a single North Korean defector to Cheong Wa Dae and listened to their vivid accounts of the inhuman treatment North Koreans endure? It has been a long time since programs dealing with human rights in the North have disappeared from South Korea's public broadcasters.
The fundamental question is if our society feels any degree of anger about the miserable human rights situation in North Korea. The same people who are hell-bent on probing every human rights abuse committed decades ago by South Korea¡¯s regimes take a vastly more lenient approach to human rights abuses in the North. Everybody knows about them, they say. They aren¡¯t verifiable. You only bring it up to undermine the North Korean regime.
We may differ about the most effective way of addressing the human rights situation in North Korea. But it is incomprehensible that the most vocal champions of human rights, whose sense of virtuous outrage transcends time and space, look on the quite unparalleled misery and abuse our brothers in North Korea suffer with equanimity.
Bush asked each of his key staffers if they read Kang's memoir and expressed the hope that all Americans would read the book to wake up to the realities in North Korea. The president¡¯s deep interest in the issue thus confirmed, the U.S. government's North Korea policy, too, is bound to be affected. It is high time the Korean president, too, included at least one memoir of a North Korean defector on his reading list.
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