How South Korea’s “human rights lawyer” president waged a quiet war to silence North Korea human rights activists

The Chosun Ilbo has published a Korean-language interview with Lee Young-hwan, the head of the Transitional Justice Working Group, one of the most respected human rights groups researching Kim Jong-un’s crimes against humanity. Although TJWG is based in Seoul and headed by a Korean, it’s really an international NGO with both Korean and foreign staff. Lee has been an activist for human rights in the North since the late 1990s, and received a Democracy Award from the National Endowment for Democracy in 2018. In the interview, Lee alleges that a few months after Moon Jae-in’s inauguration, North Korea human rights NGOs in South Korea–which are not yet willing to come forward and name themselves–became the targets of an investigation into their finances that they call groundless. (Note: an earlier version of this post indicated that TJWG was one of the groups that was investigated. Lee clarifies that he has no evidence to suggest that the authorities investigated TJWG itself.)

If the NGOs are the same ones mentioned in this Hankyoreh article, at least one of them has been operating for more than a decade. The article also names other organizations whose work does not primarily focus on human rights in North Korea. 

After reading the interview, I contacted Lee and asked him to confirm its accuracy, and to elaborate on exactly what the authorities allegedly did. Lee alleges that in 2017, prosecutors opened investigations into an alleged “white-listing” of human rights NGOs by former President Park Geun-hye’s government, in which Park steered corporate donations to them as a reward for their support for her. Police searched the NGOs’ offices and computers, and copied hard drives and external storage devices. They also obtained some activists’ personal banking records. The account holders only found out about this months later, when the banks notified them. The searches happened in late 2017, as Moon Jae-in was begging Kim Jong-un to send athletes to the Pyeongchang Olympics. Two years later, none of the organizations have been charged with any crime. The NGOs claim that the allegations against them are false. 

Lee claims that the true motive of the investigation was to tarnish the NGOs’ reputations with donors. The trick worked. The NGOs did, indeed, lose donors, and one university-based student group shut down after 15 years of work. The trick worked because South Korean police and prosecutors have almost unlimited power, while defense attorneys have very few powers to subpoena evidence, cross-examine witnesses, conduct open-file discovery, or even get bail so that their clients can assist in their own defense. 

[via the National Endowment for Democracy]

According to Lee, the NGOs that were targeted are still unwilling to speak out publicly, for fear of incurring even more impact on their donors and funding. Lee’s claim fits with other things we know. Last year, the State Department raised concerns about censorship by the Moon administration in its annual human rights report. Around the time the he alleges that the prosecutors were investigating the NGOs, Blue House officials also tried to force the U.S.-Korea Institute in Washington to fire two prominent American scholars. When USKI’s director refused, the South Korean foundation that funded USFK cut off its funding and shut it down. Leaked emails prove that the Blue House was behind this. We know, then, that it’s not beyond this Blue House to use heavy-handed methods to exert its control over NGOs. Lee is calling for opposition lawmakers to investigate whether the investigations human rights NGOs were driven from the Blue House. 

Lee also bolsters long-standing claims that the Moon administration has slashed funding for North Korean human rights groups, especially those that refuse to toe his pro-“engagement” party line. (The Moon administration denies this.) According to Lee, Moon’s party and administration see South Korea’s new North Korea human rights law–which they opposed, stalled, and weakened for years before the law finally passed in 2016–as an unwarranted interference in the North’s internal affairs (which is just how Pyongyang sees it). The U.N. High Commission for Human Rights, which conducted an extensive investigation that found evidence of Kim Jong-un’s responsibility for crimes against humanity, clearly disagrees with that view.

Now that it’s in power, Moon’s “Democratic” Party has stalled the implementation of the human rights law. It would clearly prefer that the world heard less from North Korea immigrants, at least those who resist its attempts to control what they say. It has also gone largely silent as an advocate for the human rights of North Koreans, and for North Korean refugees. Perhaps not coincidentally, China has since shut down so much of the support network for the underground railroad from North Korea to South Korea that desperately hungry women are selling themselves to sex traffickers to survive.

Pyongyang is also making its own coincident efforts to intimidate and silence North Korean immigrants in the South. It is carrying on its own smear campaigns in an attempt to discredit its most prominent émigré critics. Beginning (for the most part) around 2008, when President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, the Reconnaissance General Bureau has dispatched assassins to murder immigrants in China and South Korea (page 59), and most infamously, in Malaysia. Today, its agents are calling immigrants inside South Korea, using information leaked from South Korean government databases, in an attempt to intimidate them. The Ministry of State Security is also contacting and extorting their relatives back inside North Korea. And, in partnership with President Moon’s friends in the hard-left, Pyongyang-collaborating lawyers’ guild Minbyun, it’s still demanding that Seoul return 12 terrified young women who defected to South Korea from Ningpo, China in 2016.

N. Korean propaganda outlet demands return of restaurant workers who defected to S. Korea https://t.co/C5XO6N6UnT

” Yonhap News Agency (@YonhapNews) September 18, 2019

Sometimes, the objective of those efforts is keep Pyongyang’s (and by extension, Seoul’s) critics quiet. Sometimes, the objective is to get them to smuggle sanctioned items into the North. More often, it seeks to intimidate them into “re-defecting” so that it can stage propaganda press conferences in Pyongyang, in the hope that a few ethically pliable journalists who are eager enough for preferential access will publish its spurious claims that these refugees didn’t go to Seoul to escape oppression and starvation, but because Seoul tricked or kidnapped them. The most infamous example of this comes from the Associated Press, whose coverage echoed Pyongyang’s propaganda about the “re-defection” of a woman named Pak Jong-suk. The Washington Post later reported that the MSS has threatened Pak that it would exile her son and his family from Pyongyang to starve in the countryside if she didn’t re-defect. 

In other words, events are unfolding much as I’ve been predicting for the last several years.

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At the time these investigations began, TJWG was at work researching its ground-breaking report, “Mapping the Fate of the Dead.” That report documents hundreds of mass grave and cremation sites where Pyongyang’s enforcers have disposed of the bodies of executed North Koreans between 1993 and 2017. It drew on the testimonies of 610 escapees over four years and mapped specific execution and grave sites in satellite imagery. Importantly, those executions continued after Kim Jong-un’s succession, refuting a sophisticated campaign in South Korea”at least some of which appears to have been orchestrated by left wing public-sector unions”to personalize and normalize the man and the system responsible for those crimes. Kim’s security forces executed those people for a range of economic, violent, and political crimes, from the theft of copper wiring to murder to watching South Korean movies. Some were shot for “human trafficking,” a description that includes everything from selling women into sexual slavery to helping starving fathers escape North Korea to provide for their families as migrant laborers or smugglers. Starving people were shot for stealing corn or for cannibalism, most of them during the famine years. One wife was forced to shout at her own husband for betraying his country before a firing squad executed him for using drugs.

A few of the victims were taken into the forest and executed secretly and summarily. Most were shot by firing squads before crowds that were forcibly assembled to watch, as a warning. Most of the killing sites were along riverbanks, or in open spaces such as markets, soccer fields, and even schoolyards. Some witnesses reported that when the MSS assembled citizens to witness the executions, it had searched them with metal detectors to ensure that they were not secretly filming what followed. If the condemned received trials at all, the proceedings were formalities, held by the MSS or MPS at the execution site before the crowds, with “defendants” gagged or already half-dead from the effects of torture. In some cases, witnesses reported that the executioners wore masks and sunglasses to hide their identity”perhaps from vengeful relatives”and were drunk because even for the MSS, “killing is a hard thing to do emotionally.”

Families of the condemned found themselves stigmatized along with their loved ones. They were not permitted to reclaim the bodies of the condemned or visit their graves, which were often common, unmarked, and replanted them with trees. Other bodies were simply thrown into ravines. In the camps, some prisoners eagerly volunteered for body disposal details to get extra rations of food or alcohol. In the camp at Cheongo-ri, the bodies were burned, but the fires did not consume the bones, so authorities heaped them into a mound behind the detention building.

An astonishing 83 percent of the escapees TJWG interviewed had witnessed at least one public execution. Sixteen percent reported that a family member had been executed, and 27 percent reported that a family member had disappeared. One execution witness was just seven years old at the time. Most escapees agreed that those with lower songbun were more likely to be shot for minor crimes.

Does this sound like a state that is liberalizing, reforming, and opening?

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A great irony of Korean history is that Moon was once a human rights lawyer defending the victims of the censorship from the right. Since coming to power, he and his party have exhibited their own authoritarian streak, wielding the cudgel of state power to censor their critics, sending the police to “investigate” them, jailing others for criminal defamation, and demanding the takedown of YouTube videos his party declares to be “fake.” He has not staked his presidency on the perfection of South Korea’s liberal democracy, but on the appeasement of Pyongyang, in the hope of an eventual confederation between South Korea’s (mostly) open society and North Korea’s completely totalitarian one. But how can those incompatible political systems be merged unless the character of at least one of them undergoes profound change? North Koreans, including those who speak to NGO researchers and reporters, are the most persuasive witnesses warning us that Kim Jong-un is not committed to the reform that is a prerequisite to Moon’s plans”unless an unspoken part of it involves the subordination of South Korea’s democracy to North Korea’s tyranny.

That may explain what it is about human rights NGOs that’s so inconvenient for the political ambitions of men like Donald Trump and Moon Jae-in, who seem to believe we can appease our way out of this crisis. Research and reporting from the survivors of Kim Jong-un’s crimes reminds us that the main obstacle to peace in Korea isn’t a lack of summits or an excess of sanctions, but the fact that one of the parties to these unproductive negotiations assigns little value to the lives, the liberties, or the happiness of human beings. And if Pyongyang can’t even accept this basic value, we have little reason to believe it shares either our definition or our interest in a just and lasting peace.