Keeping America Strong. Promoting Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights Abroad.

CHOSUN ILBO NOVEMBER 2, 2022
 
With Freedom, the People of North Korea Can Make the Miracle on the Taedong River
 
By Suzanne Scholte, Seoul Peace Prize Laureate
 
The latest provocations by the Kim Jong Un regime are a stark reminder that a new approach is needed in dealing with this hostile, tyrannical regime.  The answer can be found in the presentations held during the 19th annual North Korea Freedom Week, which wrapped up earlier this month.
 
Human rights organizations from South Korea, the U.S., and Japan participated in the NKFW, which took place between September 25th and October 1st. These defector leaders, who organized this year’s North Korea Freedom Week, risked their lives to escape the North. Namely, they had to choose between life and death, and they chose liberation from KJU, so they can achieve their freedom and human rights. How did these people flee North Korea.
 
We now see that all the measures that Moon took from tearing down the loudspeakers at the DMZ to banning the creative methods perfected to reach North Koreans by land, by sea and by air, were a complete failure. Moon’s appeasement of the Kim dictatorship has only led to more suffering and death for North Koreans and continued threats to South Korea and Japan. Kim’s ongoing missile launches and constant bragging about further nuclear weapons tests are proof of this failure. Moon breathed new life into the Kim dictatorship.
 
The anti-leafletting law that he pushed through the Assembly is unconstitutional and a violation of the Republic of Korea’s international treaty obligations. South Korea is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” (ICCPR). Article 19 of the Covenant states: ‘Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.’
 
South Koreans need to remember that Kim Jong Un has never changed his ultimate objective: the subjugation of the South Korean people under the Kim dictatorship, the Mount Baekdu line. Do not be deceived that Kim will ever give up his nuclear weapons.
 
President Yoon Suk Yeol must place the human rights of the Korean people first in his heart and in his policies. The President of Korea must uphold the rights of every Korean wherever they are -- whether they are in a gulag in North Korea, a detention center in China, a refugee camp in Thailand, a Starbucks in Seoul, a church in Busan or on the KTX to Gwangju.
 
All of us must raise our voices even louder today for the human rights of the people of North Korea. We should be doing everything in our power to get information into North Korea by LAND, by AIR, and by SEA by utilizing the perfectly successful routes founded by North Korea defectors.   
 
We must communicate to the people in power in Pyongyang that all that is desired for them is: to share with them the benefits of a free people, to give them a life of hope instead of despair.
The people in the DPRK wake up in the morning with only two choices in their lives: being slaves devoted to Kim Jong Un or death and their families’ deaths. We must communicate to the people of North Korea the truth: that the miracle on the Han that is in South Korea can be the miracle of the Taedong if North Koreans are simply given that chance and freed of the brutal slavery of Kim Jong Un.
 
North Koreans were starting to learn these truths because so much information was getting into North Korea! That is why so many began escaping – not just for food, but for freedom, for a better life, to follow their dreams.
 
Today, we are living in a time where the warring is intensifying between good and evil, between freedom and slavery, between liberal democracy and communism, between truth and lies, and it is reaching a tipping point. We must all choose: which side are we on?
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