The Polish Embassy on Thursday awarded two individuals for their contributions to promoting Poland in Korea.

The deputy director of the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, Joanna Hosaniak, was given the “Bene Merito” honor from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and composer Ryu Jea-joon received the “Gloria Artis” badge from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

Ryu is a graduate of the Academy of Music in Krakow, where he studied under the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. He has introduced Polish music to Korea through various events, including a music festival he conducted at the Seoul Arts Center in 2013.

Hosaniak for the last 11 years has worked at the civil rights organization, playing a vital role in the U.N. Human Rights Council’s decision to launch the Special Commission of Inquiry into North Korea in 2013. She told The Korea Herald that she developed a passion for North Korea at Warsaw University, where she was taught by a North Korean professor between 1993 and 1999. 

“When he was called back to North Korea, he told us that he didn’t want to go back,” she said. “He disappeared one day, and the North Korean Ambassador to Poland, Kim Pyong-il, who was the late Kim Jong-il’s half-brother, came to our department (to investigate) his whereabouts.”

The incident prompted Hosaniak to research into North Korea, which was then cloaked in secrecy to an even greater degree than today.

“I suspected similar problems would exist there,” she said, referring to the infamous Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags that had darkened Poland’s past.

She started her work at the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, a Warsaw-based nongovernmental agency, and came to Korea in 2004 on the invitation of her current office.

At the Citizens’ Alliance, Hosaniak focuses on global and domestic advocacy, settlement programs for newly defected youths and assistance to refugees hiding in other countries. Founded in 1996, NKHR is the world’s oldest group dedicated solely to North Korean human rights causes.

Hosaniak met the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay in 2012, and succeeded in putting the issue on the U.N. Security Council last year. 

“It’s important that the world does not forget the public executions, concentration camps and children dying from starvation in North Korea,” she stressed. “Twenty-eight thousand defectors live in South Korea, but there are many more who did not make it here, being captured and tortured.”

Those responsible for the crimes against humanity must be brought to justice, she emphasized, contending that the totalitarian regime must be put on trial at the International Criminal Court. According to the Associated Press, a draft resolution by the European Union and Japan was submitted to the Security Council last week to refer the regime to the ICC. A General Assembly of 193 countries will likely vote on the resolution in December.

Under the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who took power in December 2011, the atrocities have exacerbated, Hosaniak claimed. The Chinese border has been aggressively fortified with guard controls, and the refugees entering the South roughly halved to 1,400 last year, compared to the previous five years.

Refugees usually receive assistance from brokers, nongovernmental organizations and church groups, in their treacherous journey through China and Southeast Asia before reaching South Korea. Many are caught in China and sent back to be punished savagely, and women are often entrapped in sex trafficking.

Regarding South Korean politics, dichotomized between the conservatives staunchly advocating the issue and progressives generally refraining out of apparent fear of provoking Pyongyang, Hosaniak asserted, “There is no ‘left’ or ‘right’ in human rights. It is a universal issue. We cannot pick and choose.”

North Koreans should decide their own fate, she noted, pointing out that the world should continue pressuring the North and documenting transgressions, as West Germany did through the Salzgitter Archives.

According to Hosniak, Poland, which was a communist country between 1945 and 1989, fared better than some other Eastern Bloc nations due to its Western European foundations.

“A big part of our society never accepted communism,” she said. “Poland’s catholic nationalism was essentially anticommunist and anti-Russian.”

Highlighting the term “the kidnapped West,” coined by the Czech writer Milan Lundera, Hosaniak said that communism did not take root in Polish society and had to negotiate politically.

Transitioning to democracy and a market economy after 1989 disenfranchised many, particularly the elders, as it required upending their mind and habits. “We had to be entrepreneurial, learn new languages and take care of ourselves, instead of depending on the state.”

Unlike the Czech Republic and Germany, which carried through their historical justice, Hosaniak argued that Poland did not properly prosecute ex-apparatchiks for misdeeds.

“The first government of Wojciech Jaruzelski said it didn’t want to draw a ‘thick line between the past and future,’” she said. “By urging everyone to simply carry on, our society has become very divided, very much.”

The Pole, who visits her country annually, said she saw sweeping changes each year, particularly after Poland joined the European Union in 2004.

“Poland still has a long way to go on social and legal reforms and modernization, but it’s amazing how freedom and basic rights, when protected, can change a country so much,” she underscored. “From what I remember from my childhood to what I see now in my early 40s, it’s like a dream come true.”

By Joel Lee (joel@heraldcorp.com)