Activists Demand South Korea Press North on ‘Enforced Disappearance Convention’

SEOUL – A coalition of activists here is crusading on behalf of tens of thousands of victims of North Korean abuses who fall into a special category: citizens of South Korea and Japan who are living in North Korea against their will.The Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, spearheading the campaign, accuses North Korea “of engaging in systematic abduction, denial of repatriation and subsequent enforced disappearance from other countries as a matter of state policy.” The coalition of NGOs is particularly upset by South Korea’s failure so far to sign and ratify the “enforced disappearance convention” adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 2010 calling “for the protection of all persons from enforced disappearance.”As a signatory to the convention, South Korea would have to “guarantee that the punishment for the crime of enforced disappearance is proportionate to the gravity of the crime,” according to the coalition’s declaration. The number of South Koreans forced to spend the rest of their lives in North Korea is staggering – of 87,000 South Koreans captured in the Korean War, only 8,343 were returned under terms of the armistice reached in July 1953. Another 90,000 South Koreans living in Japan were lured into going to North Korea with promises of a great life there, only to discover conditions were awful and they could never leave. Hundreds more were kidnapped off beaches in Korea and Japan and shipped to the North, trapped in a land that only a few have been able to escape.The declaration strikes sensitive chords in South Korea’s dealings with the North. While holding fast against North Korean threats, South Korean authorities over the years have been reluctant to offend the North with demands that they know will be automatically rejected, often in quite insulting language. Brushing aside that obstacle, the declaration wants the South Korean government to call on North Korea “to acknowledge the truth in abductions of citizens” from South Korea, and “request truth-telling investigations for harms arising from enforced disappearances” of South Koreans. One way to accomplish this goal, the declaration says, is to establish a “North-South special investigation committee.”South Korean officials have generally shrugged off such appeals simply because there’s no chance they will get anywhere with the North Koreans. They say there’s no point in angering the North Korean regime while looking for ways to resume negotiations. The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, has not responded to calls for talks since the breakdown of his second summit with President Trump in February 2019. It’s assumed that Pyongyang will either not respond to pleas for compliance with the UN convention or answer with a torrent of rhetoric denying any violations of human rights.For those looking for long-lost loved ones, the search has been filled with frustration, disappointment, and sadness. For Hwang In-cheol, the quest never ends. During the years the North Koreans have held his father, he’s never stopped waiting and hoping. “I’ve shed tears over five decades,” Mr. Hwang said. He was 2 years old when his father, Hwang Won, had the misfortune to have been on a Korean Air flight over South Korea when North Korean agents hijacked it to North Korea in December 1969. Eventually 39 of the 50 passengers were released, but not Hwang Won. A producer for a South Korean television network at the time of the hijacking, he’s not been heard from since.Mr. Hwang directs his anger at the North Koreans, of course, but also at South Korean authorities.He’s incensed at them for not pressing demands for the release of his father and thousands of other South Koreans held in North Korea, including nearly 90,000 from the Korean War, most of whom are presumed to be no longer alive after years working in coal mines.“Our government takes the attitude, ‘There is no responsibility,’” Mr. Hwang said. He has joined in urging South Korea’s new president, Yoon Suk-yeol, to bring real pressure on the North.“I appeal to your conscience,” he said. “We cannot wait any longer.”Waiting is the only option while bureaucrats typically express sympathy but then basically throw up their hands and say there’s nothing they can do.In the case of Koreans who went to North Korea of their own volition, the experience was harsh and disillusioning. North Korean sympathizers “visited the houses of Koreans living in Japan,” said Lee Tae-kyung, who was 17 when she left Japan for North Korea in 1960.“I was curious about the country,” she said. “I wanted to go.” She’d been told medical care and housing would be free and life was so good, “there were no taxes.”Yet “it was a huge shock” seeing North Korea for the first time after getting off a boat from Japan. “I thought I was on a different planet,” she said. “It was beyond imagination. There was severe discrimination. We could not do anything on our own.”Ms. Lee thought the death in 1994 of the founder of the North Korean regime, Kim Il-sung, might lead to opening of the system, but she was again disillusioned.Mr. Kim’s son and heir, Kim Jong-il, “did not care about his people,” she said. “He developed nuclear weapons while people were starving. I saw corpses on the street.”Finally, in 2003, she escaped, got back to Japan, wrote a book about her 43 years in North Korea and has been pursuing legal action against the pro-North Korean groups in Japan that induced her and thousands of others to go there.Why aren’t foreign governments doing more to protest what the North Koreans have been doing to those who, one way or another, have wound up basically living in captivity in that country?Kang Choi-hwan, who with Pierre Rigoulot is author of “Aquariums of Pyongyang,” about the 10 years he spent in a North Korean prison camp after his family had moved to the North from Japan, would rather address that question than talk about his experiences, which he recounted in his book.The Japanese and the South Korean governments are “not interested at all,” he said. “Nobody’s interested.”Won Jae-chun, a law professor who advises on human rights, is hoping that South Korea’s new president, a conservative who has vowed not to appease North Korea, will be more interested in the cause than his predecessor, Moon Jae-in, a liberal who never raised the human rights issue while looking for rapprochement with the North.The North’s policy of forcing tens of thousands to live in North Korea against their will “is not something that just happened in the past,” said Mr. Won. “This is an ongoing crime.”It’s a crime that’s all the more reprehensible considering that North Korea this week began chairing the UN Conference on Disarmament gathering in Geneva. North Korea is to lead the conference for four weeks, to the consternation of 60 NGOs and the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, which are boycotting the sessions as long as North Korea is in charge.The executive director of Geneva-based UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, said for North Korea “to preside over global nuclear weapons disarmament” would be “like putting a serial rapist in charge of a woman’s shelter.”

Activists Demand South Korea Press North on ‘Enforced Disappearance Convention’

Activists Demand South Korea Press North on ‘Enforced Disappearance Convention’

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