Wednesday, 11 a.m. While Korea is in the throes of World Cup and election day fever, some 40 people in their 20s dressed in black T-shirts gather in front of the Kyobo building in Gwangwhamun, Seoul. A few foreigners mixed in add a dash of blond hair to the bunch. A speech in English: ¡°How many people have to die before you show interest? The starving children in North Korea don't care about politics. Please, show some interest in the state of human rights in North Korea.¡± After chanting slogans, the young people lie down on the pavement like dead bodies. Only then does the performance designed to draw attention to the plight of North Koreans attract any interest from protest-weary passersby.
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LiNK: Liberty in North Korea, a U.S.-based civic group working to promote human rights in North Korea, stages a performance to raise awareness of North Korean human rights abuses, in Gwanghwamun, Seoul on Wednesday.
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The people lying on the concrete in the heart of Seoul are members of the international group LiNK:Liberty in North Korea. Its head, the second-generation Korean American Adrian Hong (25), voices his frustration about how little South Koreans seem to care about human rights abuses in the North. Koreans always talk of being of the same blood and of unification, so their silence is puzzling, he says. Based in Washington DC, the group was founded at Yale University by mostly second-generation Korean Americans in March 2004. Now it has 73 chapters and about 8,000 active members.
LiNK stages events all over the world to denounce Pyongyang¡¯s human rights record. Last year it also started investigating the conditions of North Korean refugees in China. Members arrived in Korea on May 15 and have since been carrying out the demonstrations all over Seoul. On Wednesday, they lay down on the tarmac, stood up again, lay down, stood up again, repeating the process without end; but while the suffering of North Koreans is a concern for Koreans born abroad and to foreigners without any relation to Korea, the streets of Seoul were indifferent.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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