North Korean Gulag Survivors Tell Their Survival Stories to Bored South Korean Soldiers
As it turns out, inviting a North Korean gulag survivor to speak to South Korean troops is a lot like inviting Elie Wiesel to speak at a Pat Buchanan rally:
After speaking recently to a group of young South Korean soldiers about North Korea’s harsh labor camps, former prisoner Jung Gyoung Il — himself once a soldier in North Korea’s massive army — was stunned by the questions from the audience. One soldier asked how many days of leave North Korean soldiers were given. Another asked if North Korean soldiers were allowed to visit their girlfriends. No one showed any curiosity about the notorious network of gulags, a signature marker of the North’s brutality toward its own people.
In a rare acknowledgment, the South Korean government recently noted in a report that hundreds of thousands of North Koreans are languishing in the prison camps. But Seoul has made no public effort to exert pressure on Kim Jong Il’s regime over the issue. And many South Koreans, who hold deeply conflicted feelings toward their communist neighbor, are reluctant to even concede that the camps exist. [Stars & Stripes]
Actually, I don’t think this guy’s views are conflicted at all:
Jung Wook-sik of the Peace Network, a group of civic activists, said the existence of the gulags is “not relevant” in South Korea because many citizens feel their own human rights are being abused. Lee has been heavily criticized for, among other things, subduing peaceful protests and firing members of a teacher’s union that questioned his administration.
And it’s exactly the same thing, of course! You do remember Jung, don’t you, from when he was writing at OhMyNews as “Cheong Woon Sik?”
David Hawk, author of the study “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps,” said little was known about the gulags until about five years ago, when large numbers of North Koreans managed to defect from the famine-stricken country.
Nothing in there surprises me much after four years in the USFK.
[Update: Reading more carefully now, I realize that “Jung Wook-Sik” may not be the same guy as “Cheong Woon Sik” after all.]
It’s like trying to explain to my dad that Social Security and Medicare are not solvent, and there is no way you can expect the younger generation to pay into a system when they have no expectation of getting any return at all. It’s such a horrible truth that people refuse to believe it at all. Losing $60,000 all for naught is very difficult fact to deal with.
I am sure it is the same with the South Koreans. What the North is doing to their brothers demands action. It demands that certain sacrifices be made in the name of human dignity and rights. Yes, there may be an artillery barrage that could kill hundreds of thousands of South Koreans in a single day. But we cannot let this regime stand any longer.
Perhaps I’m being cynical but the indifference and soft-ball questions indicate a country having lived with excess and liberty for far too long while their cousins starved. Imagine the concern if the US were to pull out of South Korea completely.
Joshua, first off, thanks for your service, and as an ethnic Korean, thank you for having served in the ROK, to help protect the democracy and freedom enjoyed by these spoiled brats, many of whom hated and demonstrated against you and your comrades-in-arms.
Now, Joshua, as someone who actually dealt w/ South Koreans in both work and social spheres, you won’t be shocked by what I’ll share here. But perhaps the viewpoint of a Korean-American will add value to this discussion.
I have raised the issue of North Korean suffering to many expatriate ROK nationals and most of the responses I got ranged from the following:
“Really? There are camps in North Korea?”
“Well, they’re really poor. That’s why they’re looked down on in the South.”
“Where did you get this information? I never heard of this when I was in Seoul.”
And way too often, that uber-annoying Korean moan/expression which means ultimately nothing but which barely masked their apathy: “ì—‰… 그래요?”
I find this extremely ironic given a lot of these expatriates, and their Korean-speaking immigrant counterparts who themselves became expatriates but at much younger ages upon immigration, often critically eye Korean-Americans as “insufficiently Korean” but who, for all their rhetoric of “ì •” and “단ì¼ë¯¼ì¡±” and ethnic brotherhood, couldn’t care less about what’s happening north of the DMZ – and yet many of them will side with the clowns who protested American bovine products nearly 2 years ago.
That is why, even though I’m an ethnic Korean myself, I’d love to see these spoiled ingrates shake in their boots were USFK to depart. They complain about US troops but don’t want them to leave; they exploit USFK but have no qualms about anti-US demonstrations w/ desecrations of the US flag, all the while displaying absolutely no compassion or concerns towards their brethren who are eating rats and tree bark to survive in the Camps.
Correction: “I, as an ethnic Korean, thank you…”
Did any South Koreans even get killed in that war? Sheesh.
I arrived in Korea for my second tour in the summer of 2008 and had my KATUSA data-mine the Korean media for stories about religion and North Korea. Quite apart from his efforts I discovered the life-changing movie The Crossing which was released that summer to critical acclaim and commercial failure. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why such a relevant, well-made, emotionally rivetting docudrama could be so ignored in the ROK.
Then I set up our post theater to show the movie to US and ROK Soldiers and DA Civilians. Some brought their family members. They wept. They look stunned. I did some post-showing informal interviews which revealed that even the more senior people had no idea about what goes on in North Korea or (even more glaringly) along the Sino-Korean border. A ROK senior officer thanked me profusely and said his heart was opened to the suffering of his northern relatives.
The younger ROK soldiers are more or less clueless other than what they learn about ideology and the enemy. I can’t tell you how many ROK soldiers have told me they learned more about North Korea in 15 minutes with me over lunch than in 25 years of living in South Korea. I don’t say that to be admired – its my job to know the religious dynamics of the battlefield. What is sad is that even the General Officers seem utterly clueless that Juche is a religion and must be dealt with thusly, especially if a stability operation ensues after the inevitible regime collapse. It will be Iraqx10 if we don’t get some kind of understand about who these people are and what they have been through.
I think there is also a survival tactic practiced by the ROK people – denial – due to the fact that they have lived under constant threat of total annhilation for decades with more than 13,000 pieces of artillery and rockets aimed at them at all times. You learn to ignore it and deny it and get on with your own life. Intellectual engagement can be frightening.
The reality is that the defectors have now pulled back the curtains on what is really going on in the DPRK with alacrity for the first time ever. The information is really just gaining steam since what? 2005? Soon it will be impossible to ignore – whether by common knowledge, or by a more likely scenario – civil war in North Korea.
We (US) are no better. We have a military at war while the country goes to the mall.
Well-said, KCJ. Thank you for your leadership and insight…as I know others would agree.
“We (US) are no better. We have a military at war while the country goes to the mall. “
Finally, there’s an idea you and I can agree on. Our wars have run up the federal deficit while shopping has piled up consumer debt.
Mr Chips wrote:
My apologies to you, who I know wasn’t downplaying Korean losses, but the statement reminded me of a common meme whose disseminators really do seem to forget that South Korea’s losses were many times that of the US and the UN and Korea still expends considerable treasure and severe opportunity costs in its own defense. But that is not your meme, so my apologies for glibly addressing your comment in this way; you are right about Rhee, though Rhee also saw many of his own countrymen die for what he had hoped to achieve.
And I don’t like the watering down that Roh Moohyun brought to the ROK military and its alliance with the US, and I’d like to see some of the policies he inflicted reversed or altered.
a common meme whose disseminators really do seem to forget that South Korea’s losses were many times that of the US and the UN and Korea still expends considerable treasure and severe opportunity costs in its own defense.
South Korea doesn’t take its own defense seriously and is heavily reliant upon the United States. The S.K. government spends only 2.8% of its GDP on defense (less than 20% of the budget), which is a little more than half of what the U.S. spends. Meanwhile, they continue to operate aging military systems and many military modernization programs have been canceled and the money rerouted into social welfare programs instead. The U.S. probably spends more on its bases and troops assigned to the Pacific to protect S.K. than their own government does.
The S.K. people have been insulated for too long under the American umbrella and have grown comfortable and apathetic. I once thought we had good reason to be here, but if the South Koreans don’t even take their own defense seriously and refuse to recognize the truth, why should we be there?
Arcane wrote:
South Korea’s 2.8 percent is higher than most of the US’s allies, including Canada, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, Germany, the UK, and Taiwan. (Japan is the only one with a built-in excuse.)
And this percentage rate is not counting the opportunity costs of subjecting most of the males in the country to an average of two to two-and-a-half years of mandatory military service during some of their most productive years. Those men are paid far less than the comparative rate they would get in the United States, which also cuts down on the monetary amount, but it does come at a significant cost.
The idea that “South Korea doesn’t take its own defense seriously” is a fiction. Besides, South Korea as of late (i.e., under Lee) has been expanding its cooperative role with the US outside the Peninsula, and that should also count for something.
No wonder none of you are politicians – accounting suits you better. Can we look at the big picture, for once? That is, how important is Asia as a region to the US? Do we want to spend as much money on that region as, say, the Middle East?
Furthermore, how serious are we about nuclear deterrence? Is anybody kidding themselves in thinking that our presence hasn’t had a deterrent effect on that region all these years? Why are we still doing the same old, same old with respect to “nuclear negotiations?”
While many may cringe at the thought, the time has come for swift action and you know as well as I know that the only military superpower that exists today in the US. Swift and soon.