Does S.Korea Really Want Unification?  |
| Christopher Hill has taken charge of the U.S. State Department's Korean Peninsula policy for four years. His predecessor was James Kelly. The first U.S. chief envoy to the six-party talks, Kelly was a moderate. He commanded no less attention from the two Koreas than Hill has. But unlike the loquacious Hill, he has seldom expressed his views about South Korea. When I interviewed him in May last year, he only talked about the North. But Kelly has now offered a critical analysis of the South in an article in the latest edition of National Interest, published by the Nixon Center. Titled "Two For Now," he criticizes the South’s harder line on North Korea because he believes it is even less likely to work. As a major basis of his argument for maintaining the status quo on the Korean Peninsula, Kelly cited South Koran society's attitude toward the North. "The irony is that South Korea's great success has made South Korea comfortable enough to live at least with the status quo," he writes. "While favoring unification in the abstract, South Koreans dread the potential cost of absorbing the North -- its economic weakness and its people.” “The result is great apathy and a tendency of South Korean governments across the political spectrum to seek to avoid tensions -- and even to pay North Korea what amounts to 'protection' money." U.S. officials and Korean Peninsula experts are well aware that South Koreans are fed up with discussions about human rights in North Korea. They also pay attention to the fact even after a conservative government assumed power, the administration, surrendering to North Korean threats, is trying to prevent activists from floating anti-Communist leaflets to the North. "North Korean defectors find it much easier to meet the American president than the South Korean president," some Korea experts say. In the same vein, the Washington Post noted South Korea's indifference to North Korea when it reported on Shin Dong-hyuk, who escaped from a North Korean concentration camp. "It's horrifying… that only 500 people in South Korea, where Shin lives, have bought his book," the newspaper said. The problem is that such analysis by American experts on the Korean Peninsula and the press is not just embarrassing for us. South Korea's indifference to North Korea and repeated surrender to North Korean threats are reflected in U.S. policies. When State and Defense Department policy makers discuss Korea policies, they may argue in favor of maintaining the status quo rather than unification, as Kelly says. Since the illness of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has become known, the North Korea issue is rapidly becoming an acute problem rather than one that can be left for another day. Until South Korean society in general changes its attitude toward North Korea, Washington is right to view us with skepticism. The column was contributed by Lee Ha-won, the Chosun Ilbo's correspondent in Washington. |
Monday, December 22, 2008
North Korean leader's former home open to tourists
HWAJINPO BEACH, South Korea — This small stone villa perched among fragrant pine trees is about as close as most people can get to North Korea, in more than one way. It is only a few miles away from the border, and it was the childhood home of the boy who grew up to become the leader of the North.
Kim Jong Il was 6 years old when his father, North Korea founder Kim Il Sung, took ownership of the house known as "The Castle" near scenic Hwajinpo Beach. When the Korean War ended in 1953, the border between the Koreas was redrawn, and the villa wound up in the South.
Today, the villa is a tourist site, and South Korea is planning to expand tourism on its side of the border. The South Korean government has encouraged tour operators to dream up projects such as ecological parks showing off the rare wildlife flourishing in the demilitarized zone, a 2.5-mile-wide buffer between the Koreas. A sprawling $34 million Korean War museum just north of Kim's former villa is scheduled to open in March. Elsewhere, tourists can peer at North Korea through telescopes.
South Korea's attempts at tourism may become the only chance to glimpse the secretive neighbor to the North. On Dec. 1, North Korea suspended the only remaining tours to its country, visits to the historic city of Kaesong. Earlier this year, tours to the North's scenic Diamond Mountain were suspended after a North Korean soldier fatally shot a South Korean woman visiting the resort.
Tensions between the Koreas are at a high since South Korean President Lee Myung-bak's election in February and pledge to get tough on the North. The demilitarized zone is studded with land mines and surrounded by barbed wire, and the Koreas remain technically at war.
Some 800 tourists visit the former Kim home every day. Reopened after a refurbishment three years ago, the villa displays photos of Kim Il Sung and documents chronicling his life and modern Korean history.
Not all the tourists are peaceful. Visitors scratched out Kim Jong Il's face from a childhood photo, and activists threatened to blow up the building to protest against his bid to build nuclear bombs.
One tourist shook his head in disgust at the photos documenting a war that claimed millions of lives and left the Korean peninsula split in the middle.
"I can't understand why we should retain this villa," said Jo Dong-hui, an 80-year-old Korean War veteran from the town of Gimpo, west of Seoul. "I'm seeing many old pictures of Kim Il Sung, and that reminds me of the Korean War. I barely escaped death many times back then."
Museum officials say their aim is not to glorify Kim Il Sung but to educate tourists about Korea's complicated modern history.
"Some students don't even know who started the Korean War," said Jeon Sun-bok, a 62-year-old museum lecturer who lost both of her parents during the war. "I want to tell people about the war's painful memories and explain that such a tragedy should not take place again."
Designed by a German architect and built in 1937, the two-story house with its turreted roof sits halfway up a hill, with a bird's eye view of the sea below. It first served as a vacation home for foreign missionaries.
Kim Il Sung took over the building after Korea won independence from Japan in 1945 and used it for vacations. Photos from the late 1940s show a chubby-faced Kim Jong Il seated on the steps outside the villa with Korean friends and a Soviet playmate.
In 1950, just a couple of years after that photo was taken, his father's army launched a surprise attack on South Korea. The attack ignited the Korean War, which ended three years later in a stalemate.
For decades, South Korea's military used the villa as a summer house. In 1999, under a government seeking to reconcile with the North, officials restored the house and opened it to the public.
In 2000, then South Korean Culture Minister Park Jie-won visited North Korea and Kim Jong Il. Park handed Kim an album of photos from his father's villa.
"He first pretended not to recognize it," said Park, now an opposition lawmaker. "But he later spoke to me about playing there as a child."
Saturday, December 20, 2008
The Dear Leader may be crippled by a stroke. But that's even more worrying.
By many accounts, North Korea's dictator is in bad shape after suffering a stroke in August. But the Dear Leader still presides over a handful of nuclear weapons, an arsenal of long-range missiles and a million-man Army—all in a corner of the globe where several of the world's biggest economies come together. Experts warn that a weakened Kim could in fact feel compelled to prove his toughness by threatening the outside world, and in recent weeks Pyongyang has halted its rapprochement with South Korea and torpedoed talks aimed at getting it to give up its nuclear weapons. Whether strong or weak, he's still dangerous.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Is this a performance drug that could actually increase the fairness of Olympic contests?
by Carl Elliott
In Defense of the Beta Blocker
Nobody seemed terribly surprised when two North Korean athletes tested positive for performance enhancing drugs at the Olympics last week. By now, stories of disgraced athletes sound familiar almost to the point of tedium. But if you had the patience to read beyond the headlines, you might have noticed something unusual about this particular scandal—namely, the nature of the banned drug the athletes were using. That drug was propranolol, and the athletes using it were pistol shooters. Propranolol is not exactly a cutting-edge performance enhancer. If you are familiar with propranolol, it is probably because you (or your parents) take it for high blood pressure. Its value as a performance enhancer comes from its ability to mask the effects of anxiety, such as the tremor that might cause one’s hand to shake when aiming a pistol. That propranolol can improve athletic performance is clear, and not just for pistol shooters. Whether it ought to be banned is a more complicated question.
Propranolol comes from a class of drugs known as beta blockers, which lower blood pressure by blocking particular sympathetic nervous system receptors. These receptors also happen to be the ones that get activated in times of fear or anxiety, which is why beta blockers are useful as performance enhancers. A beta blocker can keep a person’s hands from trembling, his heart from pounding, and his forehead from beading up with sweat. It can also keep his voice from quavering, which is why shy people sometimes sneak a beta blocker before giving a big speech or a public presentation. Beta blockers do not directly affect a person’s mental state; taking a beta blocker before firing a pistol is not like taking a Valium, or tossing back a shot of Jack Daniels, because beta blockers do not alleviate anxiety so much as block the outward signs of anxiety. A pistol shooter on beta blockers will still be nervous, but his nervousness will be less likely to make his hand tremble.
Beta blockers seem to be especially good performance enhancers when the performance in question involves an anxiety-producing public setting. This is because a large part of the anxiety of performing in public comes from the worry that one’s anxiety will become outwardly obvious. Most people who worry about public speaking, for example, aren't worried that they'll flub their lines, trip and fall as they approach the podium, or deliver an hour-long speech on television with their pants unzipped. They worry that their anxiety will become apparent to the audience. They're terrified that their hands will tremble, that their voices will become high-pitched and quivering, and that beads of sweat will appear on their foreheads and upper lip, like Richard Nixon trying to explain Watergate. This is why beta blockers are so useful; people who have taken a drug that blocks the outward effects of their anxiety become less anxious—not because the drug is affecting their brain, but because their worst fears are not being realized.
Beta blockers have been around since the 1960s, but it took a while before anyone noticed how useful they were for performance anxiety. Probably the first performers to start using them widely were musicians, especially classical musicians, whose hands can get clammy or tremble during a concert performance. In the mid-’70s, a team of British researchers tested the effects of a beta blocker on the performances of skilled violinists and other string musicians. They made sure that the musicians were playing under maximally stressful conditions by booking them in an impressive concert hall. They also invited the press to attend, and recorded all the sessions. The musicians were asked to perform four times each, twice on placebo and twice on beta blockers, and their performances were scored by professional judges. Not only did the musicians tremble less on the beta blocker, they also performed better. Usually the improvement was minimal, but for a handful of musicians it was dramatic.
From a competitive standpoint, this is what makes beta blockers so interesting : they seem to level the playing field for anxious and non-anxious performers, helping nervous performers much more than they help performers who are naturally relaxed. In the British study, for example, the musician who experienced the greatest benefit was the one with the worst nervous tremor. This player's score increased by a whopping 73%, whereas the musicians who were not nervous saw hardly any effect at all.
One of the most compelling arguments against performance enhancing drugs is that they produce an arms race among competitors, who feel compelled to use the drugs even when they would prefer not to, simply to stay competitive. But this argument falls away if the effects of the drug are distributed so unequally. If it's only the nervous performers who are helped by beta blockers, there's no reason for anyone other than nervous performers to use them. And even if everyone did feel compelled to use beta blockers, it's unlikely that anyone would experience untoward health effects, because beta blockers are safe, cheap, and their effects wear off in a few hours. So unlike users of human growth hormone and steroids, users of beta blockers don’t have to worry about their heads growing or their testicles shrinking. You don’t even have to take them regularly. All you have to do is take a small, 10 mg tablet about an hour before your performance.
Beta blockers are banned in certain sports, like archery and pistol shooting, because they're seen as unfairly improving a user’s skills. But there is another way to see beta blockers—not as improving someone’s skills, but as preventing the effects of anxiety from interfering with their skills. Taking a beta blocker, in other words, won’t turn you into a better violinist, but it will prevent your anxiety from interfering with your public performance. In a music competition, then, a beta blocker can arguably help the best player win.
Does the same hold true for pistol shooting? That beta blockers generally help pistol shooters seems clear. It's even been demonstrated in a controlled study. A group of Swedish researchers found that the performance of a group of shooters was improved by an average of about 13% upon the administration of beta blockers. The improvement was deemed to be the result of the effect of the beta blocker on hand tremor. (What was unclear from the study is whether the beta blocker helped nervous shooters more than calm ones, and whether its effect would have been any different if the shooters had performed in a stress-inducing public competition, like the London musicians.)
Even assuming that the effect was the same for the Swedish shooters as it was for the London violinists, however, it’s not obvious whether or not the drug should be banned. The question is whether the ability to perform the activity in public is integral to the activity itself. For some sports, being able to perform under stress in front of a crowd is clearly a crucial part of the game. Back in March, when the Davidson College basketball team was making its amazing run through the NCAA tournament, for example, the real thrill came from the ice-water-in-the-veins performance by shooting guard Steph Curry. The Davidson games were so unbearably intense that I thought my head would explode just from watching, yet it was always at the point of maximum tension that Curry’s 3-pointers would start dropping miraculously through the net. In a sport like basketball, where a player’s performance in public under pressure is critical to the game, taking a drug that improves public performance under pressure would feel like cheating. So the question for pistol shooting is this: should we reward the shooter who can hit the target most accurately, or the one who can hit it most accurately under pressure in public?
Given that we’ve turned big-time sports into a spectator activity, we might well conclude that the answer is the second—it is the athlete who performs best in front of a crowd who should be rewarded. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that that athlete is really the best. Nor does it mean that using beta blockers is necessarily a disgrace in other situations. If Barack Obama decides to take a beta blocker before his big stadium speech at the Democratic Convention next week, I doubt his audience will feel cheated. And if my neurosurgeon were to use beta blockers before performing a delicate operation on my spine, I am certain that I would feel grateful.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 11, 2008; A01
SEOUL -- In Camp No. 14, the North Korean political prison where Shin Dong-hyuk was born and where he says he watched the hanging of his mother, inmates never saw a picture of Kim Jong Il.
"I had no idea who he is," Shin said, referring to the leader whose photograph is displayed nearly everywhere in North Korea.
Inmates did not need to know the face of their "Dear Leader," as Kim is called. Behind electrified fences, they tended pigs, tanned leather, collected firewood and labored in mines until they died or were executed.
The exception is Shin, who is 26 and lives in a small rented room here in Seoul. He is a thin, short, shy man, with quick, wary eyes, a baby face, and sinewy arms bowed from childhood labor. There are burn scars on his back and left arm from where he was tortured by fire at age 14, when he was unable to explain why his soon-to-be-hanged mother had tried to escape. The middle finger of his right hand is cut off at the first knuckle, punishment for accidentally dropping a sewing machine in the garment factory at his camp.
There are 14,431 North Korean defectors living in South Korea, according to the latest government count. Shin is the only one known to have escaped to the South from a prison camp in the North.
Shin's story could not be independently verified, but it has been vetted and vouched for by leading human rights activists and members of defector organizations in Seoul. They came to know Shin when he arrived in South Korea in 2005 and was hospitalized with post-traumatic stress disorder.
"At first, I could not believe him because no one ever succeeded in the escape," said Kim Tae-jin, president of the Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag and a defector from North Korea who spent a decade in another concentration camp there. The No. 15 camp where Kim was confined -- unlike Shin's No. 14 -- sometimes released political prisoners, as it did Kim, if they were "fully revolutionized."
"I saw too many prisoners executed before my eyes for attempting to escape," said Kim. "No one made it out, except for Shin."
The U.S. government and human rights groups estimate that 150,000 to 200,000 people are now being held in the North's prison camps. Many of the camps can be seen in satellite images, but North Korea denies their existence.
In recent weeks, Shin has been watching old films of the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps, which included scenes of bulldozers unearthing corpses that Adolf Hitler's collapsing Third Reich had tried to hide.
"It is just a matter of time before Kim Jong Il thinks of this," Shin said in an interview. "I hope that the United States, through pressure and persuasion, can convince Kim not to murder all those people in the camps."
Shin is the author of a grimly extraordinary book, "Escape to the Outside World."
It is illustrated with simple line drawings of his mother's hanging, the amputation of his finger, his torture by fire. There are black-and-white photographs of his scars, as well as drawings and a satellite photo of Camp No. 14. It is located in Kaechon, about 55 miles north of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.
The book grew out of a diary he kept in the Seoul hospital while he was recovering from the nightmares and screaming bouts that were part of his adjustment.
It begins with the story of his birth in Camp No. 14 to parents whose union was arranged by prison guards. As a reward for excellent work as a mechanic, his father was given the woman who became Shin's mother. Shin lived with her until he was 12, when he was taken away to work with other children.
In the book, Shin describes the "common and almost routine" savagery of the camp: the rape of his cousin by prison guards and the beating to death of a young girl found with five grains of unauthorized wheat in her pocket. He once found three kernels of corn in a pile of cow dung, he writes. He picked them out, cleaned them off on his sleeve and ate them. "As miserable as it may seem, that was my lucky day," he writes.
Being the sole escapee in the capitalist South from the prison-camp horrors of the communist North has not made Shin a celebrity or afforded him much of a living. "Escape to the Outside World" has sold about 500 copies from its single Korean-language printing of 3,000. No edition in English is being undertaken, he said.
He is unemployed and worries about how to pay his $300-a-month rent. His defector stipend of $800 a month, which he had received from the South Korean government since arriving in Seoul 2 1/2 years ago, ended in August.
Making money. Saving money. Dating. Loving another human being. These are all strange concepts that Shin has struggled -- and largely failed -- to understand.
"I never heard the word 'love' in the camp," he said. "I want to have a girlfriend, but I don't know how to get one. Two months ago, I found myself without any money. It suddenly occurred to me that I had to go out and support myself."
Shin also struggles to understand why prosperous Koreans in the South seem so uninterested in and unmoved by the suffering of tens of thousands of fellow Koreans living in torment in the North's prisons.
"I don't want to be critical of this country, but I would say that out of the total population of South Korea, only .001 percent has any real understanding of or interest in North Korea," Shin said. "Only a few decades ago, the South Koreans had their own human rights issues. But rapid growth and prosperity has made them forget."
Shin may overstate the South's lack of concern about human rights in the North, but he has a point.
When South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was elected last year, only 3 percent of voters named North Korea as a primary concern. They were overwhelmingly interested in economic growth and higher salaries.
South Koreans want reunification with the North, but not right away, polls show. They have seen the cost and messiness of German unification. They worry about political collapse in the impoverished North and are afraid that dealing with it would lower their living standards, according to government officials and independent analysts.
For most of the past decade, South Korea's official "sunshine policy" toward the North was all but silent on human rights issues. Seoul gave Kim's government large annual gifts of fertilizer and made major economic investments -- with few strings attached.
Lee's government, which took power in February, has taken a harder line with North Korea, but a substantial portion of the public remains reluctant to condition assistance on issues such as prison camps, slave labor and torture.
Shin does not want vengeance. He'll settle for awareness.
"Kim Jong Il is a gangster," he said. "If we kill him, we will be just like him."
Instead, Shin wants South Koreans and the rest of the world to pay closer attention to what is happening to people still in those camps.
To that end, he tells his awful story -- to anyone in South Korea who will listen, to human rights groups in Japan and, earlier this year, on a college tour of the United States.
An unforgettable -- almost unfathomable -- chapter of that story is about the execution of his mother, who was hanged in 1996, on the same day Shin's only brother was shot to death. Both killings, Shin writes in his book, occurred at Camp No. 14 in a kind of public square, a place where he had seen many others executed.
Before he was taken to the square and ordered to watch them die, Shin said, he had spent seven months in an underground cell, where guards used torture to force him to talk about a supposed "family conspiracy" to escape from the camp.
Since his mother hadn't told him about such a plan, Shin said, he was startled to hear of it. His torturers also surprised him by telling him, for the first time, why he and his family were in the camp. Two of his father's brothers had collaborated with South Korea during the Korean War and then fled to the South, the guards told him. His father was guilty because he was the brother of traitors. Shin was guilty because he was his father's son.
As for the escape plan of his mother and brother, Shin knew nothing. Still, the guards wanted a confession.
As described in the book, they built a charcoal fire. Shin was stripped of his clothes. Ropes were tied to his arms and legs and secured to the ceiling of the cell. He was dangled over the fire. When he writhed away from the flame, a guard pierced his gut with a steel hook to hold him in place. He lost consciousness.
Shin recovered in a cell with the help of a sickly older man who gave him half his food ration. Months later, when Shin walked out of the underground cell to the public square, he was joined by his father.
"When I saw that place, I thought my father and I would be executed," Shin said in the interview.
Instead, to his surprise, he became a spectator. His mother and brother were brought to the square.
Watching his mother being hanged, Shin recalls, he was relieved it was her, not him.
"I felt she deserved to die," he said. "I was full of anger for the torture that I went through. I still am angry at her."
Nine years later, Shin escaped. He was working in the camp's garment factory with an older prisoner who had seen the outside world and wanted to see it again. When they were collecting wood in a mountainous corner of the camp on Jan. 2, 2005, the two ran to an electrified barbed-wire fence. His friend got hung up and died in the fence; Shin stepped on his body and managed to get through.
"I could afford little thought for my poor friend and I was just overwhelmed by joy," he writes of his first moments beyond the fence.
He broke into a nearby house, where he stole clothes and rice. He sold some of the rice for cash and made his way north to the border with China. There, he bribed guards with cigarettes and ran across the frozen Tumen River. Shin says he is still amazed that he got out.
"I think God was helping me," he said.
Here in South Korea, Shin sometimes goes to church on Sundays. "I go to the church, but I don't really understand the words or the concepts," he said.
The concept of forgiveness is especially difficult for him to grasp. In Camp No. 14, he said, to ask for forgiveness was "to beg not to be punished."
Shin could not find his uncles in South Korea. He searched for them for a while, then gave up. He no longer has nightmares and sleeps soundly through the night. There is, however, a new kind of misery.
"I have recently discovered that I am lonely," he said.
In the prison camp, he and everyone else ignored his birthday. But now when his birthday rolls around, he aches inside.
"I realize you really need a family," he said.
Shin's birthday was Nov. 19, and four friends threw him a surprise party at a T.G.I. Friday's in Seoul. It was his first birthday party.
"I was very moved," he said.
Special correspondent Stella Kim contributed to this report.
