Southern Democrats

Michael Horowitz is leaning so far over his desk, I fear he might jump into my lap. At his Washington office, the veteran conservative activist is excitedly explaining his current cause: North Korean human rights. Just as during the anti-apartheid movement, Horowitz says in rapid-fire cadences, a coalition of American pastors, rabbis, liberal human rights activists, and conservative politicians has united to face down the holocaust of our time: Pyongyang's concentration camps. Thousands at the camps are reportedly starved, tortured, and even forced to undergo abortions. Ultimately, Horowitz predicts, this movement will help push Kim Jong Il into exile, where the Dear Leader can while away his days "with his porno magazines and his sushi chef." When I run into Horowitz again this summer, it's at a Freedom House conference on North Korean human rights, where he is surrounded by people who feel as fervently about the North. Hundreds of people, from KoreanAmerican families to college students to Natan Sharansky, spend the day pouring out their emotions. Activists plan how to pressure China to protect Korean refugees--Chinese authorities often hunt down refugees and return them to the North, where they are jailed or executed.Several weeks later, I am in Seoul, and the contrast is stark. My arrival coincides with a visit by top North Korean officials wearing Kim Jong Il buttons, in town to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II. The North Koreans are received like heroes in Seoul's parliament. Meanwhile, human rights activists in Seoul tell me the government prevented them from holding protests near the Pyongyang delegation. Sadly, that's not surprising. Over the past seven years, as South Korea has pursued its "sunshine policy" of engagement toward Pyongyang, Seoul's leaders, former human rights activists themselves, have purposely avoided the crisis only a few miles north of their gleaming city--they fear emphasizing human rights will complicate their intense efforts to push the two Koreas toward reunification. Last year, a top South Korean minister asked groups to stop encouraging North Koreans to defect, and South Korea has abstained from U.N. resolutions on North Korean human rights. Another South Korean minister compared political freedoms for North Koreans to pearls for pigs--unnecessary luxuries. Some South Korean human rights activists feel physically threatened by people who favor close ties with the North. One afternoon, a contact takes me to a safehouse in the Seoul suburbs, where I wait for Kim Duk Hong, a North Korean with top regime connections who defected in 1997. After an hour bantering about foreign policy, I ask Kim about his relations with the South Korean government. His slight frame stiffens, and his raspy voice rises. "One of my main missions to come to Seoul is to fight against Kim Jong Il, and I want to go to Washington to explain this," he croaks, jabbing his finger. "But South Korea still will not issue any passport for me, so I cannot go." Seoul's human rights policy reflects a deeper divide threatening one of the most important U.S. alliances. For decades, American officials in Seoul built ties to the conservative politicians who ruled the country during the authoritarian period and early days of democracy. But these older politicians aren't in charge any more. The younger, more left-wing politicians--who came of age not during the Korean War but under dictators with ties to the United States, and who are less suspicious of North Korea and China and more hostile to the United States--are running the government. Few younger South Koreans seem worried about the North's nukes, and, in the subtle dance of the current six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program, Seoul often appeared to be taking Pyongyang's side, such as when it backed North Korea's civilian nuclear program. Recently, some South Koreans have even been holding protests against the erection of a statue of Douglas MacArthur in Inchon, where MacArthur's forces landed to help liberate the South during the Korean war. And, if those tensions don't wake up the White House, how about this? A recent poll found that, if war were to break out between Washington and Pyongyang, some 65 percent of young South Koreans would side with North Korea. And yet, too often, the United States only adds to its problems here. Americans come to Seoul and see a wealthy, free nation, without understanding how South Koreans, recently one of the poorest nations in Asia, view their country as incredibly vulnerable. (Estimates of costs for reunification of the Koreas hover above $500 billion.) Lecturing the South on human rights often backfires, hardening public opinion here against doing more to help North Korean refugees. Plus, the United States often seems hypocritical. Last year, Congress passed an act to help the North Koreans gain access to U.S. refugee programs, but it hasn't funded the act. U.S. embassies still turn away North Koreans. And, despite all the uproar about human rights coming from the United States, often the most committed activists are left on the sidelines. On my last full day in Seoul, I stop by the offices of Venerable Pomnyun Sunim, a veteran human rights campaigner and respected monk. Near a room where devotees bow before statues of Buddha, Sunim tells me that he just wants to find practical ways to protect North Korean refugees. But he suggests that too many activists and politicians, here and in Washington, may be uninterested in practicalities. "In the 1990s, a lot of people took part in helping the North Korean refugees," the monk says. Now, he says, the issue has become politicized in Seoul, and shining a spotlight on it only pushes China to deal more harshly with refugees: "After North Korean refugees became an international issue, they cracked down in China. " Near the end of our conversation, the monk removes his thick glasses. His spectacles and shaved head had masked his true age, but now I see the bags around his bloodshot eyes. "I got a call yesterday from China about one of the refugees being arrested and repatriated [to the North]," Sunim says. "They asked me to do anything. In the past, it was possible to negotiate something"-- like allowing China to quietly free them. "But now, it's impossible." And then, like Michael Horowitz, he leans over, like he's going to collapse on the table.

By joshua kurlantzick