Interview with Suzanne Scholte
By Chosun Journal
June 20, 2001
Please briefly introduce yourself.
I am president of the Defense Forum Foundation, a non-profit educational foundation that sponsors programs on national security, foreign affairs, and human rights issues. Our major focus in human rights has been the situation in North Korea.
How did you become involved with human rights for North Korea?
Our Foundation has a long history of working with defectors from totalitarian regimes. We have hosted defectors from the former Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, and I felt a real need to hear from North Korean defectors about what was happening inside their country. So, we launched a project in July, 1996 to bring defectors from North Korea to the United States. In May, 1997, we began an effort to bring North Korea’s highest ranking defector, Hwang Jang-yop to the United States. In September, 1997, we were able to host North Korean defectors Colonel Joo-Hwal Choi and diplomat Young Hwan Ko on Capitol Hill and arrange other meetings on their behalf.
At that time, Colonel Choi and Ko appealed to us to bring attention to the North Korean political prisoner camps. Here you had a high ranking military official and a high ranking North Korean diplomat describing the horrible human rights situation in North Korea. At that point we began specifically to bring actual survivors of these camps to the United States. Shortly thereafter, in April, 1998, we hosted survivors of North Korean political prisoner camps, Soon-Ok Lee and Chul-Hwan Kang, in the United States. We then began an effort to have the U.S. Congress hold a hearing specifically to focus on the North Korean political prisoner camps. Such a hearing was held in April, 1999, the first ever hearing on the North Korean political prisoner camps, and Soon- Ok Lee and Chul-Hwan Kang testified, as well as Myung Chul Ahn.
As a result of our efforts to raise awareness of the lack of human rights in North Korea, the Seoul-based Citizens Alliance to Help Political Prisoners in North Korea and the Toyko-based Society to Help Returnees to North Korea, asked us to become their U.S. partner in June, 1998. This was a great honor for us, and we readily accepted their partnership.
We continue to be heavily involved in the human rights issues in North Korea and were most recently involved with Dr. Norbert Vollertsen’s visits to the United States in March and May of 2001 including arranging for him to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, meet with reporters, foreign policy institutes, and other organizations, and we hosted a Capitol Hill forum for him as well.
What are the biggest human rights issues in North Korea today?
I believe that the North Korea government is the worst human rights abuser in the world today. North Koreans have no human rights. The most serious manifestations of this are three-fold:
a) the political prisoner camps where as many as 200,000, and perhaps many more, innocent people are incarcerated and subjected to forced starvation and horrible abuse; b) the treatment starving North Koreans receive from both their own government and the government of China for fleeing over the border to China and other countries in search of food; and c) the misuse and diversion of humanitarian aid by the North Korean government from the people for which it is intended that has caused massive starvation.
Please share any progress that has been made with the human rights situation in NK.
There has been no progress on the human rights situation in North Korea. Sadly, the policy of the Clinton administration was to ignore the human rights situation for fear of offending Kim Jong-il in trying to set up talks between U.S. and North Korean officials. The Clinton administration actually blocked a radio commentary on the political prisoner camps from airing on Voice of America when we had survivors of these camps in the United States. When William Perry was conducting his review of North Korean policy for then President Clinton, I sent him a package of documentation on the political prisoner camps — testimony from the Senate hearing, illustrated tracts of eyewitness testimony, publications from the Citizens Alliance and other human rights organizations, articles, etc. I had a chance meeting with William Perry while he was working on this review and I asked him if he received the material I had sent. He told me, yes, he had received it. His tears were on the pages, but he was not going to mention human rights at all in his review of U.S. policy towards North Korea. It is too early to tell whether the Bush administration will take a similar tact.
What can and should be done to address the human rights problems of NK?
I would suggest the following approach:
First, North Korea is a signatory to the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The least that democratic governments can do is remind North Korea of its obligations under these Covenants as we open up talks with the regime on other matters.
Second, we should continue to provide humanitarian aid but insist that aid organizations distribute the aid directly to the people needing assistance. In other words, these agencies should be allowed to stay in country to see that the aid is not diverted, so that those starving and suffering will be fed.
For example, a General Accounting Office report on the World Food Program’s work in North Korea, found that the WFP could not account for 90% of its food aid. We also know from testimony of North Koreans, that immediately after the aid workers leave, the army comes in and takes back all the food that has been distributed. I fear that 100% of all international aid is being diverted by the government and given only to the elite members of Kim Jong Il’s regime and the rest sold to maintain the massive North Korean military and maintain the lifestyle of the elites.
If we continue to provide aid, and not insist on monitoring its distribution AND CONSUMPTION by those in desperate need, then our aid is simply becoming a tool to kill and further suppress the North Korean people and to maintain a regime that caused the starvation in the first place.
Third, we should insist that China, Russia and other countries recognize the North Koreans who have fled into their borders as refugees. We should ask that these countries allow humanitarian organizations, such as Doctors Without Borders, Action Against Hunger, Oxfam and others who have left North Korea in protest to provide assistance to these refugees so that no burden would fall upon the host country.
Even today, the Chinese government refuses to allow the UN High Commissioner on Refugees to travel to the China-North Korea border to assess the situation. Hence, there are figures that vary widely between the number of North Koreans in hiding. It is appalling that the world is allowing this inhumane suffering to occur.
Fourth, we should explore creative policies that would allow North Koreans to learn more about the outside world and vice versa. This is a regime that teaches elementary students how to learn math by using equations based on how many American GIs have been killed by a grenade and issues postage stamps depicting North Korean peasants bayoneting American soldiers. The North Korean people have a completely distorted and warped view of us and of our ally, South Korea. This can only be changed by increasing the flow of information, so that North Koreans will realize what South Koreans and Americans are really like.
What is DFF currently doing with regards to NK?
We are working in three areas: government action, public education, and humanitarian work.
With government action, we will continue to host defectors from North Korea here in the United States so that the American government and its people will begin to understand what is really happening inside North Korea. We are continuing to press for Congressional hearings, press conferences, meetings with think tanks and other foreign policy organizations.
We will continue to work with our Korean partner, the Citizens Alliance, as a participating NGO in their international Annual Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees.
We also hope to sponsor a U.S. Korea Human Rights Internship Program for Koreans who want to help promote human rights for the North Korean people by working on the issue as an intern for a U.S. Senator or Representative.
With public education, we will continue to distribute the Citizens Alliance publication, Life and Human Rights, in the United States, and work to continue to increase its readership. We also are continuing to submit OPEDs and other articles on this issue to newspapers and taking advantage of speaking engagements, and radio and television interviews.
With humanitarian work, we are working with organizations to help North Korean refugees in China, Russia, and Mongolia. Because of our high profile on the North Korea issue, we have been able to help the quiet heros (the ones working to help the refugees directly) by increasing awareness of and appreciation for their work.
We are also constantly assembling and disseminating information for magazines, television programs, humanitarian organizations, anyone who calls our offices in order to get the word out. For example, just this past week, we had three calls for specific information from a major monthly magazine, a weekly journal, and a television news program. The first two are definitely going to run articles about the North Korean human rights situation, and I have my fingers crossed that the television news program will do the same.
We will continue to work on the aforementioned projects and others until human rights come to North Korea, the political prisoner camps are shut down, and freedom and democracy come to the entire Korean peninsula.
Please share some memorable experiences during your work for NK human rights.
I could fill up pages of stories but will mention just a few memorable events:
a) Meeting North Korean defectors like Colonel Joo Hwal Choi, Young Hwan Ko, Soon Ok Lee, Chul Hwan Kang, and Myung-Chul Ahn who have dedicated their lives to helping their suffering countrymen and women in North Korea has been a tremendous blessing to me. Meeting Reverend Benjamin Yoon of the Citizens Alliance and Professor Haruhisa Ogawa of the Society and their colleagues in South Korea and Japan has been a tremendous inspiration to me.
b) The evening after the Senate hearing on the North Korea political prisoner camps, I found out from Soon Ok Lee that her church pastor in Seoul had put together a prayer team to pray for the work I was doing in trying to get a Senate hearing. I believe their prayers led to our success in having a hearing on the political prisoner camps.
c) After I gave a rather strongly worded speech on North Korea in Tokyo that mentioned the misuse of humanitarian aid, a woman with tears in her eyes approached me to tell me that everything I said was true. She said she could not tell me her name but she had recently visited her sister in North Korea and told me her sister’s family was forced to sign a paper indicating they had received rice from one of the humanitarian groups, but the army came back as soon as representatives of the humanitarian organization left their village and took back the rice. Her sister and her sister’s family were starving. Colonel Joo Hwal Choi testified that this was what is happening to the aid, but it was heartbreaking to hear this directly from a family that had been affected.
d) Another memorable moment was learning from Chul Hwan Kang that one of the reasons for his defection from North Korea was that he had overheard a Seoul radio broadcast about a strike for higher wages among workers in South Korea. That few minute broadcast made him realize that everything he had heard about South Korea was a lie and he realized that South Koreans had jobs, were paid, and had the freedom to go on strike peacefully without risk of incarceration.
Why should Americans be involved with human rights for North Korea?
It is our moral obligation. To whom much is given, much is expected. The North Koreans are our brothers and sisters who deserve the same basic human rights that we take for granted. It is our moral duty to do all we can to help them.
What is your advice to anyone interested in helping?
First, they should launch their own letter writing campaigns: write to President George Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and their own elected Senator and Representative and ask them to work for human rights for the North Korean people. We underestimate the effect that our letters and phone calls have on our elected representatives, but these letters and phone calls have an impact. Most people do not take the time to do this basic action. One Congressional staff person told me that it takes just four individually written letters from the constituents to get an issue on their Congressman’s “radar screen.”
Other people to write would include officials from the United Nations, China, and Russia to request that they grant refugee status to the North Koreans who have fled North Korea.
Second, they should continue to keep informed by visiting your website and by contacting us to get on the Citizens Alliance’s publication, Life and Human Rights. Things are happening every day — more North Koreans escaping over the China border, others showing up seeking asylum, children dying of starvation, innocent people imprisoned, tortured, executed — every day. This North Korean regime is responsible for the deaths of millions of people and every day we do not act more people die.
Third, they should decide the best ways to use their own talents and then decide to do some or all of the following: work with us in sponsoring visits by North Koreans to the United States, help raise funds for organizations like the Aegis Foundation, Exodus 21 and the Ton-a-Month Club that are helping the North Korean refugees; sponsor their own showing of documentaries on North Korea to their civic groups, churches, colleges, etc., write letters to the editor about the issue, send petitions to the UN, China officials, and our government, those are just a few ideas.
Web site: www.defenseforum.org
