The Marmot’s Hole

MUST READ!!!!

In case you haven’t read it yet, Time Asia’s coverboy this week is the Rev. Tim Peters, who does really amazing work for North Korean refugees trying to reach safety. Anyway, the piece on Rev. Peters and the Underground Railroad is a great one, and one that leaves nobody looking good. Here’s just part of it:

Peters takes it for granted that North Korea and China will be hostile to his efforts. Far more galling to him is the attitude of the U.S. and South Korea. President Roh Moo Hyun’s government in Seoul pursues, in Peters’ words, a policy of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” in its pursuit of engagement with the North. The Seoul government, Peters says, does not want to do anything to upset North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, lest it reduce the chances for peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula. “Any systematic effort to bring North Koreans to freedom might turn what now amounts to a trickle of refugees into a destabilizing flood—and Roh wants no part of it, nor do most South Koreans,” says a Western diplomat in Seoul.
Last year, the South Korean government slashed in half the cash portion of the subsidy it used to pay refugees who make it to the South from 6 million won ($6,320) to 3 million ($3,160). The defectors often used the money they were given to help finance efforts to get their relatives out—typically by paying middlemen who are in the people-smuggling business for profit, but sometimes donating to Christian groups such as Helping Hands. The reduction in funds, coupled with the Chinese crackdown, has had an impact. The number of refugees making it out of China to South Korea fell to 1,217 last year, according to the South Korean government, down from a record 1,894 in 2004.
But for the Christian activists who staff the Seoul Train, nothing has been more deflating than the actions—or, more precisely, inaction—of the Bush Administration. The activists viewed Bush as one of their own, a conservative Christian committed to human rights, unafraid to speak the truth about North Korea and its dictator. (”I loathe Kim Jong Il,” the President famously said in 2002). Last year, Peters believes, Bush showed his true colors when he spent more time in the Oval Office with Kang Chol Hwan, the author of a shattering memoir of life in the North Korean gulag, than he had with Roh Moo Hyun. In October of 2004 Congress passed the North Korean Human Rights Act, and in the summer of 2005, Bush appointed Jay Lefkowitz, a former domestic-policy advisor in the White House, as a special envoy to deal specifically with North Korean human-rights issues. Though Bush called for $24 million a year to accept refugees from North Korea and broadcast news and information there, Congress has yet to appropriate any funding to carry out the policies. TIME has learned, however, that the Administration, under Lefkowitz’s prodding, is studying whether the United States might be able to take in a small number of North Korean refugees each year—something which, if it happened, would no doubt anger North Korea. Bush also raised the plight of North Korean refugees directly with Chinese President Hu Jintao during their meeting in Washington last week, seeking, a White House official said, “a more transparent process” in how Beijing deals with those who come across its border. It is, says Peters, about time. “Who but [Secretary of State] Condi Rice, an African American, could better understand the absolute necessity of helping these refugees? The underground railroad is named after the network that helped the slaves, for heaven’s sake.”

Coincidentally, the piece starts off with this episode:

On a winter’s day in late 1998, Kim Myong Suk, 20, lay shivering and weak from hunger on the cold concrete floor of a cell in a prison camp in North Korea, not far from the Chinese border. She was five months pregnant, and about to lose her unborn child. Of all the horrors she recalls from that day, she says now, two stand out. One was that her sister, who lived in a nearby town, had been brought in to watch what was about to happen to her. And the other is the North Korean guard’s name, the man who she says killed her unborn child: Hwang Myong Dong. It is not a name, she says, “that I’ll ever be able to forget.”
Hwang, Kim says, referred repeatedly to the baby as “the Chink,” because the father was a peasant from northeastern China, where Kim had fled earlier that year. As she lay on the prison floor, Hwang demanded that she abort the fetus herself. Kim refused, so the guard began kicking her over and over again in the stomach. Then he beat her, and continued beating her as her sister screamed, until Kim Myong Suk blacked out. When she regained consciousness, she says, she “was taken to a clinic in the camp, and in the most blunt manner, they removed [the fetus] from my body.”

If you wanted to see the Rodong Shinmun’s commentary on miscegenation put into practice, look no further.