Fund NK
refugees before it's too late
By Casey Lartigue, Jr.
In April 2013, University of Texas Professor Jeremi Suri upset a number of
expats in South Korea and experts around the world with his New York Times
column, "Bomb North
Korea, Before It's Too Late."
Some local pundits I know could barely mention the column without cursing
Suri, denouncing him as an oddball pontificating from afar, suffering no
consequences for his reckless proposal. I wondered: Have these people heard
North Korean refugees discuss North Korea?
A reporter who recently interviewed me along with Park Yeon-mi, a North
Korean refugee and my TV podcast
co-host, was taken aback by her strong responses to his questions
about tourism in North
Korea. My point to him: Tourism to North Korea is this week's hot
topic for you, but for her it is about a country that "broke" her
family.
Her relatives were tortured after she escaped, her father died in China when
the family was on the run and she and her mother both were ready to commit
suicide when they were threatened by Mongolian police with repatriation to
North Korea. Plus, she was
recently notified that she is on North Korea's target list.
Tourism to that hellhole? I wonder if runaway American slaves in the 1850s
would have supported tourism to Alabama.
Another North Korean refugee friend can't decide if he is more disgusted with
North Korea or America. He was tortured by North Korean agents, his relatives
were tortured after he escaped. He dreams of the day he can dance on the
graves of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.
Why is he angry with America? He accuses it of being too soft on North Korea.
He advocates assassinating, not talking with, the North Korean leader and the
top elite. He says that North Korea's power comes from America dealing with it
in a civilized way. The only way North Korea will come to its senses, he
says, would be a brutal demonstration of American power, not polite American
diplomacy.
At a discussion I moderated on
July 13, Kang Myeong-do, the son of a former prime minister of
North Korea, claimed that America should have bombed North Korea in the 1990s
when its nuclear program was still in its infancy. Kang should know ― in
1994, after he escaped North Korea, he revealed secret
details about North Korea's nuclear bomb program. He stresses
today that the North Korea "problem" would not exist if the Clinton
administration had taken radical action back in the 1990s.
I pushed him a bit by asking him what would be the radical policy today. His
response? The United States should close the border to North Korea, both
literally and figuratively, to starve the country. I doubt China would
welcome that, but his point of radical action is not far removed from former
CIA analyst Sue Mi Terry arguing
to "Let North Korea collapse" with a tougher policy of containment.
Another refugee friend of mine was disgusted when she heard recently that the
South Korean government promised $7
million more in humanitarian aid to North Korea. She says when she
was in North Korea that she never received or even heard about any aid from
South Korea, the North Korean regime was still claiming to be aiding South
Korea. Her suggestion? Cut off all foreign aid to the North Korean
government; instead, give the money to refugees to send to relatives. That
would flood North Korea's emerging markets and give more people the financial
means to escape.
I like that idea. One, instead of a sliver of foreign aid perhaps trickling
down, people could receive the money directly from family members. Two, that
would verify in a practical way South Korea's wealth. Three, the Kim family
regime couldn't take credit for the money coming from the "rats and
cowards" who escaped. Four, relatives sending money directly would
monitor it better than global humanitarian agencies can track where their aid
goes.
Stephen Linton of the Eugene Bell Foundation pointed out at a Cato Institute
event in 2010 that countries tend
to adopt North Korea's tactics. "South Korea tries to
approach North Korea the way North Korea approaches South Korea, by funneling
everything through government ministries, by strangling in a sense or denying
its private sector full participation," Linton said.
My friend's proposal isn't as dramatic as bombing or starving North Korea, I
know. Critics may dismiss North Korean refugees they disagree with as being
too personally involved (but then, they denounced Suri for not being
personally involved). Critics may say $7 million sent most recently isn't
enough, but that would be even truer when the money is funneled through the
regime. But my friend's proposal would send money to North Koreans, rather
than to a government that breaks up families, runs modern gulags and executes
people for seeking freedom.
The writer is the Director for
Iinternational Relations at Freedom Factory Co. Ltd. in Seoul and
the Asia Outreach
Fellow with the Atlas Network in Washington, D.C. He can be
reached atcjl@post.harvard.edu.
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