North Korean ordeal haunts US
activist By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON - Robert Park cried out in
torment as you spoke on the phone from Seoul about
what he had endured - not at the hands of the
North Koreans who held him for 43 days after he
crossed the frozen Tumen River into North Korea on
Christmas Day, 2009, but about a South Korean
report claiming to quote him on what he had
endured.
The article carried by Yonhap,
the South Korean news agency, purporting to quote
his remarks about the sexual torture inflicted on
him, is "fabrication", he said, demanding
"retraction" and accusing Yonhap of "corruption"
for having run the story without his approval.
Just what happened to the 31-year-old
crusader after he entered
North Korea bearing a
message of "God's love" for North Korea's late
leader Kim Jong-il is not clear. What is known is
that, when he was packed off to Beijing on an Air
Koryo flight and released into the hands of an
American diplomat, he was a broken man.
He's still not saying exactly what got the
North Koreans to say, before his release two years
ago, on February 9, 2010, that he had "seriously
repented of the wrong I committed, taken in by the
West's false propaganda". Whatever it was, he's
been confined off and on to mental hospitals in
Long Beach, California, and his native Tucson,
Arizona, and lives in constant mental agony.
Gradually, however, Park is recovering to
the point at which he can muster the strength and
concentration to crusade full-time against what he
says is the "genocide" committed by North Korea's
leaders against their own people. At the same
time, he's resolved to sue in the United States
against North Korea for the "torture" inflicted on
him - and hopes to recover funds from North Korean
overseas accounts that he can then dedicate to his
crusade.
But what did the North Koreans
really do to him?
Park, often reluctant to
talk to journalists, exploded in our conversation
while talking about the Yonhap report quoting him
as saying North Korean women had "surrounded me
and did the worst thing to me to try to make me
commit suicide". The report said he had described
how the women "beat his genitals with a club to
'make me not to have a baby and get married
forever'."
One of the women mocked his
evangelical Christian faith while he was suffering
under the glare of a bright light, according to
the Yonhap story, asking, "If your God is so
great, why doesn't he save you?"
Park, if
anything, is more committed now than he was when
he entered North Korea with a letter pleading for
then-leader Kim Jong-il to "please open your
borders so we may bring food, provisions,
medicine, necessities, and assistance to those who
are struggling to survive".
Those demands
may not have been quite so upsetting to the North
Koreans as his plea to "please close down all
concentration camps and release all political
prisoners today". North Korea has repeatedly
denied the existence of a vast gulag system that's
believed to be large enough for about 200,000
prisoners, new arrivals constantly replacing those
who die of disease, hunger and overwork or are
executed.
At the time of his release, Park
said nothing as he was whisked by reporters before
boarding the flight from Beijing to Los Angeles,
but the impression was perhaps the North Koreans
had brainwashed him into believing that life there
was not so bad after all.
That impression
was soon disproved as Park vanished for months
into the care of family members, activists and
doctors battling to enable him to lead a normal
life. Suffering from what doctors agree is a
classic case of "post-traumatic stress disorder",
Park has alternated between stages of suicidal
depression and exhilaration over his campaign
against North Korean "genocide".
In his
conversation with me, Park appeared near-suicidal
again as a result of the Yonhap article. Asking me
for advice on what to do, I reminded him he could
do nothing about North Korea if he weren't around
to conduct his campaign. I also urged him to
"forget the Yonhap story", telling him, "It
doesn't matter what they say, it's what you think
and know that counts."
By Thursday, he
seemed to have regained enough composure to be
able to tell me, by e-mail, "Currently my life is
focused on three things."
First, Park
wrote, he hoped to prove, by writing articles and
encouraging "the protest movement that North Korea
is in fact committing genocide and crimes against
humanity, mass atrocities". "The international
community," he said, "has a responsibility to
protect millions of North Korean victims."
Second, he wants "to meet with Samantha
Power" - US President Barack Obama's special
assistant on human rights with the National
Security Council - "and others in the US
government and confront them on this matter".
"The humanitarian and human-rights
emergency in North Korea should no longer be
trumped by fears/concerns over North Korea's
nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction,"
he wrote. "The only way the security issue will be
resolved is by toppling regime, any objective
observer knows that."
Third, he would like
to obtain funding for "North Korean victims".
"Many of my closest friends are North Korean
refugees who have contacts inside," he wrote.
"Hope and pray there will be a movement to get
behind North Korean defectors' remittances so that
people in North Korea will be able to subsist,
defend themselves, and so that they will know we
love them. "
"Remittances can avert a
military conflict by conveying our love and
solidarity with the North Korean people and
exposing the North Korean system and lies about
South Korea and the world in general," said Park,
"so that when intervention eventually takes place
(which we are calling for through these protests
and in every possible way) there could be a quick
surrender and re-unification. "
But does
Park think his campaign stands a chance of
acceptance? "It may sound like a pipe dream to
most," he wrote, "not to me".
While
spreading the word about North Korea, however,
Park remains outraged by the Yonhap report. He
never met the Yonhap reporter who wrote the
article, he told me, and says the details it
offered were not accurate.
He fears the
article could damage his chances of winning a law
suit against North Korea and feels he has to set
the record straight before actually going to
court.
But to whom did Park speak, and why
did Yonhap carry the article? Yonhap has not
responded publicly, and Park has not offered an
alternative version of his ordeal.
Interestingly, however, he has not denied
the accuracy of a report by Pyongyang's Korea
Central News Agency on why the regime let him go.
"The relevant organ of the DPRK
[Democratic People's Republic of Korea] decided to
leniently forgive and release him, taking his
admission and sincere repentance of his wrong
doings into consideration," said the KCNA article,
put out five days before his release.
"What I have seen and heard in the DPRK
convinced me that I misunderstood it," Park was
quoted as saying, "so I seriously repented of the
wrong I committed, taken in by the West's false
propaganda."
All that Park has said is
that he was forced into "a false confession". Only
he knows what the North Koreans did to extract it
from him.
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