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'ASEAN spirit': A viable human right solution to North Korea
Sitting on the discussion panel in a grey suit flanked by three other stately figures, grief could not be detected in 33-year-old Hyuk Kim, a PhD candidate based out of South Korea
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itting on the discussion panel in a grey suit flanked by three other stately figures, grief could not be detected in 33-year-old Hyuk Kim, a PhD candidate based out of South Korea.
Kim is a former kkotjebi ' a term for a homeless street urchin ' born in 1982 in Chongjin, the capital of North Korea's North Hamgyong province. He lost both his parents before entering his teens and had to resort to begging and stealing to survive.
'Before the economic crisis [of the mid 1990s] and the famine in North Korea, street children lived from begging and stealing on the street. But after that it was difficult ' food, home and avoiding capture; the youth called it the three concerns of life,' Kim recounted his experiences, an interpreter by his side.
In November 1995, a year before his father passed away from starvation, he was placed in a state-run orphanage in Onsong, North Hamgyong, that housed around 250 children. Many of the children there had died of malnutrition.
The UN estimated that a large-scale famine that took place in North Korea in the 1990s had cost as many as 500,000 to 1 million lives.
At 16, Kim had to leave the orphanage to start working, but quit soon after because he was too weak from malnutrition. He became desperate and resolved to cross the border into China, even though he knew that escapees would be severely punished, even executed.
He fled the country, picked up clothes from the street and started collecting Chinese currency. In 1998, security inspections had him caught and returned to North Korea, where he was sentenced to three years in kyohwaso ' a long-term detention center with forced labor.
Kim was charged with illegal border crossing, illegal trading of currencies and smuggling clothes into the country. Luckily for him, he was granted special pardon two years into his sentence.
'I was released on July 6, 2000, because of a decision by the Workers Party, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary. But I weighed 36 kilograms and [...] I agonized over how to live,' Kim said. 'There was no home to go back to and my only brother was in prison. So I decided to go to South Korea.'
Kim is now in his seventh year of study in South Korea and has joined the Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights (NKHR) to advocate for North Koreans still suffering from a similar existence.
North Korea drew international attention after a series of UN reports in 2011 and 2012 criticized Pyongyang as the human rights condition in the country 'continued to deteriorate'.
A scuffle broke out at a UN meeting in March 2012 as North Korean delegate So Se-pyong walked out on a meeting of 500 delegates. The North Korean representative said Pyongyang dismissed the reports as a 'useless interpretation', the AFP news agency reported.
A year later, the UN Human Rights Council set up a commission on inquiry (CoI) to investigate 'the systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights' in North Korea, and the issue was firmly placed on the agenda of the UN Security Council.
In an effort to maintain momentum on the issue, Marzuki Darusman, the UN special rapporteur on human rights tasked with compiling the reports, suggested looking at new ways of addressing the North Korea situation.
Marzuki said that ASEAN's role as a common regional platform for shared experiences might prove a useful entry point for dialogue.
He said that countries with experience in discussing their human rights situation to international fora ' such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand ' would do well to engage North Korea in seeking answers to their own problems.
'Eventually, I think a number of Southeast Asian countries could share their experiences with the northeastern states as to how things evolved in ASEAN since the beginning,' he told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of the panel event on Wednesday.
'There's a need for a comparative approach, which puts North Koreans at ease [for] not being specifically spotlighted, but encouraged to integrate, come out and interact with the international community ' with a view of aligning their standards.'
In a recent example of regional solidarity, Indonesia vowed in a tripartite agreement with Malaysia and Thailand to provide shelter for thousands of stranded Rohingya migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh.
As a result, the government of Myanmar had also agreed to take responsibility for the lives of the Rohingya migrants, a minority historically persecuted by a section of the Myanmarese population.
Meanwhile, the South Korean ambassador to ASEAN, Suh Jeong-in, principally agreed with Marzuki's non-confrontational approach but warned against any heightened expectations.
'At the beginning we shouldn't expect too much; I think we [should] start small, but in the future it could be big. I think that is the 'ASEAN way of doing things,'' the envoy said on Wednesday.
Suh told the Post that it would take some time before there would be a semblance of the ASEAN community in the context of Northeast Asia, as even the Southeast Asia region was in the midst of consolidating itself through the ASEAN Economic Community.
'We are [headed] in the same direction, but even for ASEAN, each and every country has its own agenda, its own situation ' and that is normal,' the ambassador said.
