|
A group of former North Korean spies and POWs who were held for decades in South Korean jails because they refused to renounce their country¡¯s Stalinist ideology but were repatriated in 1994 or 2000 on Friday sent a complaint to our National Human Rights Commission and the government's history review committee demanding compensation of over US$1 billion for pain and suffering. The money is to come from the Grand National Party, which they call the heir to the dictatorial South Korean regimes that kept them under lock and key. ¡°The torture and other mistreatment constitute a crime against humanity that must be judged rigorously from the perspective of international law on human rights and democracy." they write." The GNP and its chairwoman Park Geun-hye must be called to account in the eyes of history."
Given how tightly things are controlled in the North, this is evidently orchestrated by the authorities. How preposterous that a regime condemned by the UN General Assembly in November for ¡°systematic and egregious human rights abuses including torture, public executions, abduction of foreigners, human trafficking, forced abortion and infanticide" should have the cheek to talk about human rights and democracy.
Over 80,000 South Koreans were taken to the North during the 1950-53 Korean War, and Pyongyang abducted more than 450 South Korean fishermen since the country's division in 1945. We know from testimonies that North Korea interns citizens caught attempting to flee the country in concentration camps or executes them publicly, and has conducted biochemical experiments on some of them. If the families of South Korean abductees and North Korean defectors were ever to demand compensation for their persecution and oppression, will the North Korean regime agree to consider it from the perspective of human rights and democracy?
Pyongyang would not have alighted on the NHRC and the history committee as ¡°honest brokers" in its grotesque demand for compensation from the GNP unless it believed our government to be on its side. The human rights body has squeezed its eyes tight shut to North Korea¡¯s human rights abuses, and one commissioner is on record as attempting to rationalize that practice by saying that ¡°even if there are¡± public executions in North Korea, South Korea too has seen a lot of human rights suppression, such as the execution of innocent people on trumped-up charges in the People's Revolutionary Party incident and the 1980 Gwangju democratic uprising.
North Korea is wise to the fact that this administration, under the mantle of righting past wrongs, plans on turning our history upside down, and its attack on the GNP reveals a strategy to stoke internal conflict in the South. The government is obsessed with our past wrongs but deliberately blanks North Korea¡¯s very present human rights abuses by repeatedly abstaining from UN resolutions on the matter: what more will it take before we wake up?
|
