Siding with the devil

Ryu Sang-joon in 1998 left North Korea with his 9-year old son after his wife and second son died of hunger. He arrived in South Korea alone and tried to bring his son in China to the South. In 2001, however, his son and other people trying to escape the North were discovered by Chinese police in the border region between China and Mongolia and were disbanded. His son later died of exhaustion in the desert. Ryu sent a letter of appeal to the Mongolian president, and eventually brought his son’s remains to the South and held a memorial service at Unification Observatory in Paju, Gyeonggi Province. His story inspired the South Korean film on defectors, “Crossing.” Ryu supported other defectors with the money he made in South Korea.

Eight years ago, Lord David Alton, a life peer of the House of Lords and chairman of the British-North Korea Parliamentary Committee, met Ryu and heard about the horrendous human rights conditions in the North. Since then, Alton has taken the initiative to let the world know about the conditions in North Korea by inviting defectors to parliamentary hearings. When Pyongyang blasted him for this, he said, “I have to see it for myself.” He then visited the North four times and spoke his mind to the communist regime. In an interview with The Dong-A Ilbo, he said, “If you remain silent even if you see the devil’s face, you are like the devil.” He implied that South Korean liberals are immoral if they remain silent about the North’s human rights abuses.

Such liberals have been criticized by a third party because they blasted dictatorship in South Korea 40 years ago but not the father-to-son succession and human rights violations in North Korea. Pro-North leftists also oppose legislation on human rights in North Korea for fear of provoking Pyongyang. Though they oppose nuclear development, they support the North’s nuclear tests as its right to self-defense. When Park Sun-young, a conservative South Korean lawmaker, went on a hunger strike earlier this year to protest the repatriation of defectors back to the North, liberals did not show up at all.

The former Soviet Union was once an attractive country to European intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw and Andre Gide. Even philosopher Bertrand Russell praised its welfare programs and planned economy, saying, “It is painful to face the truth but this protects the delusion of self-deceiving people.” Was this a confession? Novelist Stefan Zweig made up his mind after getting a memo from someone while visiting the former Soviet Union. The memo said, “Don’t trust everything that you see and hear here. We can say what we are allowed to and even you are being monitored.”

Editorial Writer Lee Hyeong-sam (hans@donga.com)