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Defected former North Korea Workers' Party Secretary for International Affairs Hwang Jang-yup recently received a parcel containing a hatchet and a photograph of Hwang defaced with red paint. The parcel arrived after Hwang in a lecture last month said the ultimate solution to the North Korean problem is ¡°eliminating Kim Jong-il." The parcel contained a threatening letter that referred to his remarks in the lecture and warned, "Traitors must pay the price.¡± Already on Dec. 13, Hwang got a similar letter, and in 2004 he was sent a photo of himself with a kitchen knife stuck through the face.
Next month, Hwang marks 10 years since he risked his life coming to the South and left his family behind. He is not a man whose resolution is easily shaken by threats from North Korea or its fifth column. But what must be unbearable is the persecution he has been subjected to by the South Korean government, in the very country he came to in search of freedom. For most of the 10 years he has lived in the South, he has lived the life of a virtual person non grata, unable to meet people he wanted to see and say what he wanted to say. He published a newspaper for North Korean refugees that criticized the government's North Korea policy, only to be stopped by the National Intelligence Service. How bitterly disappointed he must have been to find that somehow Constitutional rights did not apply to him.
When he visited the U.S. in 2003, agency minders shadowed his every step to check whom he met and what they talked about. There were even scuffles when staffers of an American congressman attempted to push them out of an office where the legislator was meeting with Hwang. Hwang was invited to a party for the musical "Yoduk Story", about a political prison camp in the North, by a U.S. human rights organization this year. But he could not go because Seoul asked the U.S to take charge of Hwang's personal safety.
Coming to South Korea in 1997, Hwang promised to expose the reality of North Korea, with its ¡°phony Juche (or self-reliance) ideology and phony socialism.¡± A decade later, we find a ring of North Korean spies infused with the Juche ideology operating close to the centers of power. No fewer than 37 lawyers affiliated with an organization whose name contains the word "democratic" stand ready to defend the spies. In heckles from the public gallery, prosecutors are apostrophized as "bloodsucking trash.¡± No wonder Hwang wrote to the Japanese translator of his memoir, "I've contemplated suicide many times, I¡¯ve been so disappointed in the South Korean situation."
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