Two earlier columns (“Baekbeom and NK human rights” & “Baekbeom would free NK’s political prisoners”) maintained -- on the basis of a dispassionate analysis of Kim Koo’s verified words and by weighing the factual trajectory of his life and thought -- that the independence and unification advocate would have exhibited the profoundest concern and compassion toward North Korea’s political captives if he had lived to see the situation develop. In fact, before his assassination, he called for the release of all political prisoners in Korea; including patriots and humanitarian figures such as pacifist hero Godang Cho Man-sik.

Kim’s chosen nom de plume, Baekbeom (roughly signifying “ordinary person”), further lends credence to this conviction; he would have never allowed for the most persecuted and voiceless among our people to be politicized, effectively forgotten or lost to war. His pen name connotes an unfeigned empathy and unshakable solidarity with Korea’s most oppressed.

In the foreword to his popular memoir “Baekbeom Ilji” (1947), Kim humbly confesses, “I agreed to the publication of this book not because I thought I was a great person but because I wanted it to be a record of an ugly and incapable man who lived his life as one among his people. My pen name, Baekbeom, signifies this intention of mine.”

Baekbeom would have labored conscientiously to ensure that the lives of Korea’s most ferociously maltreated were effectually protected, freed and rendered necessary assistance forthwith -- as ostensibly guaranteed by core international laws and norms, and pursuant to the post-Holocaust worldwide commitment pledging “never again” would there be crimes against humanity, genocide or mass atrocity.

What Carla Del Ponte -- formerly prosecutor for tribunals investigating atrocities in Rwanda and Yugoslavia -- recently pronounced with respect to the crisis in Syria doubtlessly holds true in North Korea’s case, as well. She, after resigning from the UN’s Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria citing “absolutely no success,” lamented, “Believe me, the terrible crimes committed in Syria I neither saw in Rwanda nor ex-Yugoslavia. We thought the international community had learned from Rwanda, but no, it learned nothing.” Del Ponte believes today she was placed in the role (in Sept. 2012) as an “alibi.”

A few years ago, UN investigators confirmed that the North Korean people’s suffering was “unparalleled” -- and evokes the Holocaust and Cambodia’s genocide. They invoked the global community’s categorical “Responsibility to Protect” the North Korean people. Notwithstanding, the emergency in North Korea with respect to political prisoners and North Korean refugees in China has become markedly and objectively worse. A staggering number of innocent individuals -- including very many children -- have suffered brutality and died without the slightest glimmer of a response.

Rather, these days, we hear only of deafening controversy surrounding THAAD, or terrifying, publicized threats attributing a comprehensively dubious “legitimacy” to the option of nuclear pre-emptive attacks -- such decisions would in actuality involve inhumane massacres of a maximally vulnerable, already heinously victimized civilian population, which the world has essentially skirted its clear-cut legal obligation to protect over several decades.

US Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has repeated ominous messages such as “If there’s going to be a war to stop him (Kim Jong-un), it will be over there. ... If thousands die, they’re going to die over there (on the Korean Peninsula).”

Sen. Graham horrifyingly alludes to nuclear preventive strikes, as have President Trump and other high-profile figures. “There is a military option to destroy North Korea’s program and North Korea itself,” Graham recently articulated to media.

US Secretary of Defense James Mattis has threatened not merely the end of Kim Jong-un’s regime, but “the destruction of its people.”

The near proximity of nuclear test sites and facilities to North Korea’s political prisoners signifies that any strike against these localities would involve a genocide of those the world has already flagrantly failed to assist -- in keeping with central humanitarian obligations under international law.

North Korea’s political prisoners are routinely exposed to deadly radiation due to brutal slave labor such as forced excavation work at nuclear test sites performed without any protective gear. The tens of thousands of innocents in North Korea’s “absolute-control-zones” are all under a death sentence; every effort must be made to preserve their lives and deliver them out of these veritable killing fields. Over a million innocents have died in the North’s prison camp system. These are good people who need and deserve our help.

Though informed, committed and effective action prioritizing human rights is imperative, very little is even being said on the subject these days, perhaps owing to the fact that the North’s political prisoners would be killed first in the event of a preventive war. Instead, “All options are on the table” is reiterated.

In that case, South Korea, the US and the international community should commence vigorously to reaching out to the North Korean people, excluding the intractable and cruel Kim Jong-un. There is an enormous deal of alarm and discontent in North Korea presently that could be leveraged to achieve both denuclearization and the effective and long-overdue freeing of North Korea’s political prisoners.

In “Baekbeom Ilji,” Kim Koo acknowledges there were even apparent “pro-Japanese collaborators” who secretly harbored patriotism. After release from a prison controlled by Imperial Japan where he was severely tortured, Baekbeom learned via newspaper reports that Korean detectives had delivered him from certain execution by concealing his true identity to their Japanese superiors. He wrote, “Though they were working as informers for the Japanese, these detectives were hiding inside their hearts a patriotic mind and a love of our people.”

Innumerable like individuals exist within North Korea, even among the elites. Robust confidence-building measures must be directed toward them for the collaborative “peaceful” removal of Kim and the release of all of the North’s political prisoners forthwith.

This wouldn’t constitute artificial unification; rather, pursuant to international laws and norms, any regime that is manifestly failing to protect its population from genocide, mass atrocity and crimes against humanity forfeits its legitimacy. There is no human rights disaster in the world today as well documented as North Korea’s; the Kim despots themselves, who won’t spare uncle, brother, nephew or “friend” in their dogged pursuit of god-like power, are the culprits.

Baekbeom poignantly recounts another incident, where Koreans conscripted into the Japanese Army defected to the Provisional Government.

He wrote, “The students, who were raised in Japanese-occupied Korea and did not even know the Korean language well ... had come thousands of miles to the Provisional Government in order to devote their lives to the independence movement ... they had done this despite the danger of being caught and shot to death by the Japanese. Upon hearing this, our compatriots were so deeply moved that they could not find words to say.”

A greater number of North Korean soldiers have already braved maximal risk to defect to the South; they are increasingly doing so at even greater peril, and most would assuredly defect if they encountered a viable opportunity. We must exhaustively and intelligently reach out to all of them, not muddle toward war.

Baekbeom would likely additionally recommend for South Korea -- the sole state on the peninsula to successfully democratize and safeguard human rights -- to be far better protected and achieve self-sufficiency regarding its security expeditiously, having written “Because I have felt the pain of being invaded by another nation, I do not want my nation to invade others. It is sufficient ... that our military strength is such that it is able to repel others’ invasion.”

As The Korea Herald’s Aug. 11 editorial soberly admonishes, “Misguided action can lead to chaos; now is time to review nuclear armament.”


By Robert Park

Robert Park is a founding member of the nonpartisan Worldwide Coalition to Stop Genocide in North Korea, minister, musician and former prisoner of conscience. He can be reached at wcsgnk1@protonmail.com.-- Ed.


(This article is the third in his three-part series on Baekbeom.)