Congressional ‘miracle’ rebuts PCUSA’s Korean stance
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, January 10, 2005
One of the crowning achievements by a coalition of American evangelicals, Jewish constituencies and Korean-American Christians during 2004 was what’s known as the North Korean Human Rights Act.
Michael J. HorowitzMichael J. Horowitz, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget during President Ronald Reagan’s administration, calls it a miracle.
The circumstances may vindicate that assessment.
While professional diplomats, South Korea and many European nations lobbied against the act, joined by a chorus of nays from the Presbyterian Church (USA) and its mainline Protestant partners, Congress listened to the voice of the coalition that was knit together by Horowitz, the National Association of Evangelicals and many Korean-American Christians.
The coalition argued that North Korean’s communist dictator, Kim Jong-Il, was intentionally starving and murdering North Korean dissidents, skimming the international aid to prevent the fall of his collapsing regime and trying to bully the world into recognizing the legitimacy of his reign. Even recently, the dictator has used fear to firm up allegiance from his people, warning them that the U.S. is on the brink of invading North Korea.
Dear leader Kim Jong-ilDisputing the merits of arguments for reconciliation – or “appeasement” – the coalition urged the U.S. to apply the kind of pressure that could lead to the collapse of the communist government in North Korea.
Armed with the cries from persecuted North Koreans who described deplorable conditions in the nation’s gulags, the coalition took its case to Congress with a threat: If the House and Senate didn’t approve the North Korean Human Rights Act, there would be political repercussions. What it would do, the coalition made clear, was ceaselessly publicize the atrocities under North Korea’s supreme leader. Remember the holocaust, they said, as a poignant reminder of the parallels between Kim Jong-il and Adolf Hitler.
Both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House voted for the North Korean Human Rights Act – unanimously. The gist of the measure is that, despite starvation conditions in North Korea, U.S. aid cannot be given without some assurance from Kim Jong-il that he is not siphoning it off to buy more comic books (he has the largest collection in the world) or skimming it, as he did $20 million from an $80 million aid gift so he could buy a fleet of Mercedes Benzes.
But those are the coalition’s minor irritants. In a recent lecture that was broadcast on C-Span, Horowitz focused on the 200,000 Koreans who are slave laborers at the gulags – at least those who survive the torture. He described an incident in which two babies were kicked by a guard into a waste pond to die. Starvation, executions, forced abortions, torture were everyday occurrences. Horowitz said North Korea’s communist leaders are now considering gassing prisoners to reduce execution costs – a repetition of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”
“Inside North Korea, they suffer at the hands of a totalitarian dynasty that permits no dissent and strictly curtails freedoms of speech, press, religion, and assembly,” Rep. James A. Leach, R-Iowa, said on the House floor during debate. “The regime maintains a brutal system of prison camps that house an estimated 200,000 political inmates who are subjected to slave labor, torture, and even lethal chemical experimentation. Since the collapse of the centralized agricultural system in the 1990s, more than 2,000,000 North Koreans are estimated to have died of starvation.”
Noting the ties between Korean Americans and their families in North Korea, Horowitz expressed confidence that there will soon be video tapes available that will graphically depict the atrocities being committed by the communists. And he predicts that, within a year, North Korea’s government will collapse.
In the meantime, Horowitz acknowledged that North Koreans will suffer – but that has been their lot for more than 50 years. The quicker a communist regime can be removed, the better for North Koreans and South Koreans, he said.
The Presbyterian Church (USA), urged on by its most prominent native North Korean, former PCUSA Moderator Syngman Rhee, has argued against the legislation, contending that it would undermine ongoing reconciliation efforts between North and South Korea.
In an address to a small group during the 216th General Assembly (2004), Rhee “railed against” the North Korea Human Rights Act, according to the Presbyterian News Service, which covered his presentation. Rhee was quoted as saying the measure “is a hard-line bill which threatens to withdraw even humanitarian aid,” which is true – if North Korea’s government continues to enslave, torture and execute its dissidents and distribute that aid on a formula that awards the largest portion to communist party leaders and almost nothing to the dissidents.
Rhee said the act would undermine the negotiations for reconciliation and create a large refugee exodus from Korea into China, further destabilizing the situation. The coalition backing the legislation noted the irony of attempts by North Koreans to flee to China, itself a communist country that severely restricts freedoms. They add: Even suppression in China is better than life in North Korea.
Syngman RheeRhee is an unwavering voice for nonintervention between the two Koreas, which are separated by a demarcation line along the 38th parallel. The son of a North Korean Presbyterian minister, he escaped the north and joined the army in South Korea. Eventually, he came to the United States, was educated at Presbyterian schools and ordained as a minister. His career includes being employed by the denomination’s headquarters and formerly serving as the president of the National Council of Churches. Since retirement from the staff in Louisville, Rhee has lived in Richmond, Va., where he has taught some seminary classes.
While the General Assembly of the PCUSA took no action on the North Korean Human Rights Act, that didn’t prevent the staff from initiating its own lobbying effort. Normally, the PCUSA’s lobbying strategy requires General Assembly authorization and is handled by the Washington Office, although the Washington Office frequently goes off on its own, unauthorized course.
But this time someone on the staff posted on the PCUSA’s Web site – through a section used to promote the PCUSA’s Korean Presbyterian congregations – a letter that Presbyterians could use to lobby against the legislation.
In a political advocacy campaign that was never authorized by the General Assembly, the staff suggested that Presbyterians copy the letter and send it to congressional leaders.
By placing the lobbying letter on the Korean section, the staff left the impression that the denomination’s Korean Presbyterians opposed to the legislation. But many Korean Presbyterians probably favored the act. They often have sharp disagreements over U.S. policy covering North Korea. In this case, Korean Christians from all denominations were at the forefront of the campaign for the law.
Some of the key provisions of the North Korean Human Rights Act include monitoring human rights violations, requiring access to information about how aid is used, helping dissidents gain political asylum in the United States and seeking to force Kim Jong-il to end North Korea’s law that prohibits its citizens from listening to unauthorized broadcasts. (They can be executed for tuning into the wrong broadcast.)
The act lists 25 “findings” by Congress, including:
- “The Government of North Korea divides its population into categories, based on perceived loyalty to the leadership, which determines access to food, employment, higher education, place of residence, medical facilities, and other resources.”
- “The Government of North Korea executes political prisoners, opponents of the regime, some repatriated defectors, some members of underground churches, and others, sometimes at public meetings attended by workers, students, and schoolchildren.”
- “The Government of North Korea holds an estimated 200,000 political prisoners in camps that its State Security Agency manages through the use of forced labor, beatings, torture, and executions, and in which many prisoners also die from disease, starvation, and exposure.
- “Prison camp inmates have been used as sources of slave labor for the production of export goods, as targets for martial arts practice, and as experimental victims in the testing of chemical and biological poisons.”
- “According to credible reports, including eyewitness testimony provided to the United States Congress, North Korean Government officials prohibit live births in prison camps, and forced abortion and the killing of newborn babies are standard prison practices.”
- “More than than 2,000,000 North Koreans are estimated to have died of starvation since the early 1990s because of the failure of the centralized agricultural and public distribution systems operated by the Government of North Korea.”
- “The risk of starvation, the threat of persecution, and the lack of freedom and opportunity in North Korea have caused large numbers, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of North Koreans to flee their homeland, primarily into China.”
- North Koreans who seek asylum while in China are routinely imprisoned and tortured, and in some cases killed, after they are returned to North Korea.”
- “Although the principal responsibility for North Korean refugee resettlement naturally falls to the Government of South Korea, the United States should play a leadership role in focusing international attention on the plight of these refugees, and formulating international solutions to that profound humanitarian dilemma.”
- “In addition to infringing the rights of its own citizens, the Government of North Korea has been responsible in years past for the abduction of numerous citizens of South Korea and Japan, whose condition and whereabouts remain unknown.”
North Korea is the largest food aid recipient in the world. It also has the fifth largest army in the world. There are no reports of starvation among the military or the government.
In October 2004, Christianity Today published an interview with Horowitz. He was asked, given the nature of the North Korea regime, whether he was concerned that the legislation could backfire and make things even worse in North Korea. This was his response:
- “The advocates of status quo in these human rights dialogues always try to impose an unfair set of ground rules by which policies are to be judged. Those of us who want to promote human rights and put it on the table in the face of bluster from the regime are accused of creating risks that the regime will react and start World War III. Hard to imagine how they are going to start World War III because we don’t give them more aid. We’re not invading them. We’re just conditioning our aid on progress on the human rights side. But we’re accused of creating threats. And I acknowledge in every policy there is risk.
- “But what is troublesome is that the proponents of the status quo, people who want to give more money to Pyongyang in exchange for some promise that they make on Weapons of Mass Destruction, never acknowledge the risks that are entailed by their policies. They act as if the only risks that take place are the risks of people who want to alter the status quo. History teaches us just the opposite, that in dealing with dictatorships, they’re always more fragile and weak than they seem to be. And that when free people speak of the need for religious freedom and human rights, they unleash forces within those countries that weaken the hold of its dictatorship. Silence doesn’t really work. Appeasement doesn’t really work. And people who appease and who are silent are the ones who are generating risks.”