A Quiet Man, Heard Across Oceans: Dr. Jae-Joong Nam, 1945-2005
Dr. Nam was born at Andong, in present-day South Korea, in 1945. He graduated from medical school at Korea University and studied for his medical board certification at Georgetown University.
After the successful completion of his certification in 1986, he entered private practice in Falls Church, Virginia, near Washington, D.C.
To Those Who Knew Him, A Gentle Influence
Dr. Nam’s son, Joon, recalls his father’s gentleness and modesty. Neither of Dr. Nam’s sons fully appreciated the importance of their father’s activism until some of Washington’s most powerful people came to his funeral. In fact, Dr. Nam was a small, soft-spoken man who was shy of personal publicity, even as he demonstrated an impressive capability to direct it toward North Korean refugees from behind the scenes.
In 1998, after visiting China and being moved by the plight of North Korean refugees fleeing their impoverished homeland, Dr. Nam founded the Aegis Foundation, an NGO dedicated to helping North Koreans and publicizing the conditions in which they live, and often die. He divided his time between actively assisting North Korean refugees, meeting with representatives of influential Washington think-tanks, and carrying the message of North Korea’s suffering to the news media.
Dr. Nam financed most of Aegis’s efforts from his own pocket and dramatically scaled back his medical practice to devote more of his time to helping the North Korean people.
A Key Co-Founder of a Movement
Dr. Norbert Vollertsen (news links) remembers Dr. Nam as a source of cheerful encouragement in the darkest times. “‘You are in big trouble,’ he always smiled when I was beaten up or staged some other protests. It was his habit of appearing when most needed, and then quietly retreating into the background until needed again, that endeared Dr. Nam to those who worked alongside him. On some occasions, this included offering to pay for Vollertsen’s lodging, or his travel back to Korea to continue his activities.
In recent months, Vollertsen had noticed that the strain of the constant travel and activity was showing in Dr. Nam’s visibly deteriorating health. Vollertsen pleaded with him to cut back, but Dr. Nam refused.
Vollertsen credits Dr. Nam with introducing him to some of America’s most important activists for North Korea–Suzanne Scholte, Sin-U Nam, and Chuck Downs of the North Korean Freedom Coalition; and Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute. Dr. Nam worked tirelessly with these leading activists, dozens of others, and sympathetic government officials to bring Hwang Jang-Yop, North Korea’s highest-ranking defector, to Washington in November 2003. Hwang’s testimony before Congress was a milestone in the formation of Washington’s North Korean human rights lobby, a movement whose subsequent accomplishments include the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 and gulag survivor Kang Chol-Hwan’s recent visit to the White House.
Dr. Vollertsen added his energy, uncompromising dedication, and moral authority to the movement, along with his media contacts and his ability to attract needed publicity. In return, Dr. Vollertsen gained access to policymakers who could implement the policy changes he passionately urged. It was just one early example of Dr. Nam helping to form some of the movement’s most important interpersonal connections.
Capturing the World’s Attention
Another well-known activist, Rev. Douglas Shin (news links here, here, and here) (site), credits Dr. Nam with helping to bring the mass migration of starving North Koreans into China to the attention of The Washington Post in 1998.
Shin also attributes international media coverage for the reports of North Korea’s gas chambers to Dr. Nam’s efforts. The story resulted in a full-length BBC documentary, Access to Evil, which in turn resulted in prominent editorials in The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, among others, and which inspired Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to add his considerable voice to the movement. The reports virtually assured the unanimous passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act.
Like Vollertsen, Shin recalls Dr. Nam for his kindness, his dedication, and his omnipresent smile.
Dr. Nam’s partner in the Aegis Foundation, Sei Park, credits Dr. Nam with bringing human rights conditions in North Korea to the attention of Representative Henry Hyde and Senator Sam Brownback, the two most important congressional boosters of the North Korean Human Rights Act.
Park described how Dr. Nam “published countless articles . . . , organized and participated [in] numerous conferences, worked with government agencies, NGOs, and individuals who run covert operations in China and other countries to help [North Korean] refugees.
Working through the Aegis Foundation, Dr. Nam and Sei Park also secretly provided food, medicine, and shelter to refugees trying to reach South Korea through China. They also worked with other activists to help the refugees escape. Park described the danger of those operations and cited them as the primary reason the Aegis Foundation kept a low profile. In China, both the activists and the refugees were in constant danger of arrest.
One of the operations Aegis helped to fund, a secret orphanage and day care center for North Korean refugee children, was discovered by Chinese police. One activist was arrested and remains imprisoned in China.
How Dr. Nam Changed His World
It would not have mattered to Dr. Nam that in Aegis’s clandestine efforts, the secrets had to remain hidden while the tragedies were exposed to the world. It is for this reason that his efforts as an activist in Seoul and Washington will be those for which he is remembered.
The Reverend Tim Peters operates Helping Hands Korea, a charity that helps North Korean refugees as they make their desperate journeys through China. Peters also recalls Dr. Nam as a man who would arrive to marshal a well-cultivated network of friends and contacts when problems seemed insurmountable. Rev. Peters remembers a typical case in 2004 when Dr. Nam rescued a floundering, fund-starved project, receiving no recognition for his untiring efforts. “I don’t think that fazed him in the least,” Rev. Peters recalls, “[g]etting the message out and getting the job done: that’s what mattered to Dr. Nam. That will always be an enduring memory for me.
For Joon Nam, part of his loss was not having fully appreciated his father’s impact. It was on describing this realization that he became emotional and had to pause before continuing the interview.
Dr. Nam himself died without knowing the full measure of his own impact. He passed away a little more than a week before Kang Chol-Hwan, one of the North Korean defectors whose plight he had worked tirelessly to publicize and ameliorate, spent 40 minutes with the President and Vice-President of the United States in the Oval Office. That was approximately the same amount of time President Bush had spent with South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun just a few days before.
After the meeting, President Bush reportedly put Kang’s book, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, on the mandatory reading list for White House staff, a move that triggered unfavorable comparisons in South Korea. Dr. Nam’s efforts helped to lay the groundwork for that meeting, and probably played at least an indirect role in arranging it.
Dr. Nam believed that persuading other nations to abandon their support for the North Korean regime was essential to changing conditions inside North Korea itself. His efforts moved at least one of them, his adopted homeland in the United States, and it is likely that the North Korean people will eventually remember him for this. It is an idea that gives those of us who knew him some comfort, even knowing that Dr. Jae-Joong Nam did not live to see the hour of liberation he worked so tirelessly to bring about.