Akwe Amosu: Hello and welcome to Strength and Solidarity. I’m Akwe Amosu, back with episode 48 of our podcast about the tools, tactics and strategies being used to defend human rights. And this time…
- What’s the best way to fight for the rights of North Koreans, and do they agree? And
- In Zimbabwe, how a bit of soccer can keep relationships cordial in court
AA: While South Koreans have been busy defending their democracy from a would-be autocrat, it’s occurred to me to wonder how North Korean exiles in the south might feel about the possibility of martial law. But in the interview I’m about to share, I learned that making assumptions about their views would be a mistake… Usually, those whose rights are denied are vocal in condemning the abuse and authoritarianism. That seems only natural. But North Koreans who have escaped their country, often seem to prefer keeping a low profile. Before I go any further, a quick refresher on the history. The Korean peninsula has been divided since the end of the second world war. Japanese rule over Korea ended with Japan’s surrender to the Allied Powers in 1945 and the northern part of the peninsula came into the orbit of the Soviet Union while the South was aligned with the United States. Five years later, North Korea invaded the south and the three-year conflict resulted in the deaths of three million people, before an armistice in 1953. The cold war ended in 1989, but the icy relationship between the two Koreas did not, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the loss of economic support for the north, contributing to a terrible famine in the mid-1990s. The suffering that caused helps explain why shortly afterwards, tens of thousands of North Koreans began to escape, bringing with them stories of what it was like to live in the DPRK. The accounts were shocking and drew worldwide criticism, particularly in 2014 when a UN Commission of Inquiry or COI, published its report on rights abuse in the north. But recently, the flood of people escaping has shrunk to a trickle. When Covid hit in 2020, North Korea closed its borders and since then, barely 25 people have found their way south. That stasis seems mirrored in the level of global attention to human rights in North Korea. A sort of lassitude seems to have set in, with most attention now given to geopolitical questions of strategic influence and the threat of North Korea’s nuclear weapons. And maybe one of the reasons for that low energy is that there seems to be some doubt and ambivalence among both North Korean escapees and South Koreans about what the goal of any strategy should be. So, what is the best course for a human rights advocate who wants to keep up the pressure? That’s what I wanted to ask Hanna Song, the executive director of the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, based in Seoul, South Korea.
AA: Welcome Hanna.
Hanna Song: Lovely to be here.
AA: We don’t get a chance to hear much about the North Korea/South Korea situation. And so, it’s good to have an opportunity to hear from someone who’s actually working, as it were, at a frontline, as front as it can get, and so can we start by just asking you, what are you seeing in the North?
HS: To tell you what’s happening in North Korea, you need sources, you need information, you need the people – you know, for most human rights groups or organizations, they’re able to gather that firsthand information, they’re able to be on the ground, even if it’s in war-torn countries. But we can only rely on people who have left. And with so few people leaving, I mean, North Korea was already one of the most isolated countries in the world. It’s become even more isolated, which has made, I think, our work so much more difficult. So, there are about 34,000 North Korean – we call them escapees, and we can talk about that word as well. There’s some call them escapees, some call them defectors, some call them refugees, just North Korean people – I’ll just use escapees for now. There are about 34,000 escapees who have resettled in South Korea; 72% are women. And less than a hundred people have come directly over the DMZ, the demilitarized zone that separates north and South Korea. So, the majority of the 34,000 North Koreans who have come to South Korea, majority are women, have come through China and Southeast Asia, either through Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and then Thailand is where they’re “safe.” For them to get from North Korea to China, they have to cross a river. The common story that we hear is that a young woman is approached in North Korea of, “Hey, do you wanna go to China to earn some money,” work at a factory, go work on a farm, all these different opportunities. What instead they face is they are trafficked to China with what China had with the one child policy, especially in rural northeast China, regions in China, um, a lot of these older, more traditional families preferred to have sons over daughters, so there’s a gender imbalance. And so with a lack of women in these communities, they will buy wives from North Korea. And that is the most common route we hear of how North Koreans are able to leave the country.
AA: Those women, maybe they take that deal, maybe they decide to make that transition, but they don’t stay, you’re saying, they then figure out how to keep moving and find their way to South Korea?
HS: So it, it really depends. The majority of people who have come over the past four years have actually been women who have been in hiding in China for decades. So China doesn’t recognize North Koreans as refugees. They see them as illegal economic migrants. And so if they are found, caught in China, they are forcibly repatriated. China has an agreement with, a bilateral treaty with North Korea, so that if you are found in China, you’re forcibly repatriated. And of course, if you’re sent back to North Korea, the Ministry of State Security, the intelligence agency will interrogate you, and you’ll be tried and punished for a political crime, for a treasonous act of leaving the country. And so even if they go to China, they’re not safe. Even when they’re in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, they’re not safe. Only in Thailand, because the Thai government have an agreement with the Republic of Korea, South Korea, that they’ll send them to South Korea, that they are safe. And so there’s always the risk of being sent back to North Korea and so some people, if they’re very lucky and they have some money, or they meet somebody who can help them, a broker that can help them, they can come after a few weeks. Some people are in China for over 10 years. So it really depends on who you meet, if you have the money, and since it’s been about 25 years since the wave of North Koreans have been leaving the country, now there’s obviously a generation of North Koreans who have resettled in South Korea who are able to bring their family across. And so they will pay quite a hefty fee to brokers to guide them. So they’re the ones that aren’t getting trafficked, but they’re the ones that are guided through China and Southeast Asia, and maybe can come to South Korea in a matter of a few weeks. But this is all pre Covid times.
AA: And then we have Covid. And then what happened?
HS: So for Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, COVID was the best thing that ever happened to him. You know, he can use this global public health crisis as a great reason to tell his people that we’re completely closing off the borders with China. So even, at least before there was, um, trade between China and North Korea that the North Korean people could make use of to be able to cross and smuggle or, you know, pay bribes to the border guards to be able to go back and forth. You know, Kim Jong Un completely closed off the borders. And same with China as well. They built, hundreds of kilometers of electric fences to completely make it impossible for people to leave. And so, what we have seen is that North Korean people are no longer able to cross into China. Um, and the 20 or so people who have come after Covid have actually come via boat from North Korea to South Korea, which was really unheard of before COVID times.
AA: So you have essentially, the effective ending of transition from north to south, in terms of population. In South Korea, where does the attitude towards North Korean refugees, escapees stand?
HS: So actually, July 14th this year, the president, Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, passed the first North Korean Defectors Day, a day to celebrate North Korean defectors. And it – there were really mixed responses within South Korea and even the North Korean escapee community. I think a lot of South Koreans see North Korean escapees, defectors, refugees as being resilient, but also that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re interested in North Korean human rights. And there’s also a huge generational difference as well.
AA: Because the people who came from North Korea are in the majority of cases from a previous generation, an older generation.
HS: Yes. And also until the 1980s, there was a real threat of North Korean spies infiltrating South Korea and a huge, you know, feeling of “red scare” within South Korea. You know, my grandparents’ generation lived through the Korean War where North Korea attacked, invaded South Korea and for them, North Korea means, they, you know, my parents were taught in school that North Koreans looked like goblins and that was a, a genuine fear that they had. My mother had, has, it’s only been a few months since she’s ever met a North Korean person before. And I’ve worked in the field for 10 years, and I meet North Korean people every day. And she was so scared to meet a North Korean person because of the education she’d experienced. I think that’s different to my generations, the, you know, people who grew up in the 1990s, there’s actually a lot of indifference. But then if you frame them as refugees, because that’s seen to be more of like this international, like human rights framework, then the emphasis is more on the fact that they’re refugees rather than they’re North Korean. So, then they want to embrace the fact that, you know, we’re a Western country that embraces diversity and resilience but they still don’t want to feed into that North Korean human rights narrative, and they’re not interested in North Korean human rights work, per se.
AA: So, for you, coming into the leadership of an organization focused on North Korean human rights, this doesn’t sound like very receptive conditions. How is this work seen?
HS: It really depends on our audience. And I think that’s something I struggle with, having not grown up in South Korea. I’m South Korean, my parents are South Korean, but I grew up in Europe. I grew up in the UK and the Netherlands and so I approached the North Korean human rights issue and working in the North Korean human rights NGO from a more human rights perspective but then entering this organization, I see that, you know, sometimes we frame it as a unification organization, and sometimes we put forward the North Korea part first, and then we hide the human rights part. And sometimes we put the human rights thing first and then, you know, dilute the North Korean part. It really depends on who the audience is. And for the older generation, they’re not so much interested in the fact that we’re a human rights organization. They want the unification to be at the forefront, that through us talking about North Korean human rights, it allows them to have this narrative of North Korea being this quote unquote, evil, like bad state that we must, you know, absorb through unification, and South Korea’s the better country. That’s the narrative that they want to push forward. And then for the younger generation who are not so interested in unification, because they think of it as a tax burden, this is seen as an old issue. They’ve never lived with North Korea. They see us as two separate countries. They don’t want to think of it as a unification issue per se, but if we talk about it as universal human rights, like civil liberties, that’s something that they are a little bit more receptive of. And if we frame ourselves as a professional NGO that has, you know, UN ECOSOC status and we do all these submissions to UN treaty bodies and, we’re making statements at the Human Rights Council, that’s what they’re interested in, as a gateway to enter that world of the UN and international organizations and North Korea just being a tool. That’s the response that we’ve been seeing. And then the larger general South Korean population – indifference, like not interested whatsoever.
AA: So are you the only primarily North Korea-focused human rights organization? Or are there others?
HS: There are others. There are North Korean escapee-led organizations who are a little bit more focused on unification or maybe even like social welfare for escapees. There are like different generations of North Korean-focused human rights NGOs. We saw a large boost of new North Korea-focused human rights NGOs growing actually after the UN published the Commission of Inquiry report in 2014 because that report stated that the human rights violations that are occurring in North Korea, crimes against humanity, calls for accountability, criminal accountability, calls for referral to ICC. And that led to a lot of donors being interested in, how can we apply this framework of judicial accountability to North Korea. And so, uh, especially those who had been educated in Western countries and, Ivy leagues, saw these buzzwords of like, ‘accountability’ and started creating their own organizations. So, there are different generations of, I think North Korean human rights organizations. you know, we call them the post-COI groups and then the pre-COI groups. And then, um, I think the first generation of North Korea-focused groups aren’t actually human rights groups, but more like pro-democratization or liberation movements.
AA: So how do you see your own task? It sounds like a situation which has a fair amount of cynicism in it. An older generation that wants reunification, but that’s not really on the table. A South Korean population that’s not that interested and, maybe even fears too much involvement because of potential cost and the tax burden of any future reunification, and a group of North Korean actors who are essentially relating to the international infrastructure of human rights for pragmatic reasons, shall we say. Where do you put yourself in this situation? How do you decide what needs to be done?
HS: Yeah, I think it’s difficult not to stay in this, you know, cynical view that I have. I mean, I think something that I’ve been reflecting on a lot is 2024, this year marks 10 years since the 2014 COI report came out and that is really heralded as such a major milestone in our community, the fact that for our community, the best thing we have done was we got the UN to write a report for us of – you know, who was that report for? How many North Koreans who are living in South Korea, how many victims, even know that the report came out, what do the affected communities actually want? And I think that’s what I would like to spend my time doing, being the vessel of that. I can understand this international human rights framework, but I, I don’t think I have the answers of where the movement should go. I don’t fight the older generation of unification because I think that’s also actually what a lot of North Koreans want as well – it’s a form of unification. It’s – at the end of the day, they just want to be able to go home they just want to be able to see their family. Whether that means North Korea is abiding by the ICCPR or not, that doesn’t mean really mean anything to them. Um, and so unification can be a means to realizing rights and freedoms, and if there’s a political way of doing that, you know, we would support it. But,
AA: But there’s no prospect of that in the short term.
HS: It’s really difficult in this current climate where you see Kim Jong Un, you know, palling up with Putin and Xi Jinping – that being said, I don’t even know if having dialogue is the best way. The previous president who was, somewhat progressive and in the South Korean context was on the left side of the spectrum, he, you know, President Moon Jae-in, was known for the putting together all these summits between Trump and Kim and all these photographs and that I think got the international community really excited about maybe the prospect of unification. But what was happening behind the scenes was he was restricting organizations like ours from doing our work because he knows that North Korea doesn’t want us to be talking about human rights. And so if there is unification, you know, unification for who, and what does peace mean and what does that political agreement mean? I think I always sound like, you know, I’m saying no to all these options and you know, I wish I had the answer, but you know, if anybody had the answer, I don’t think this movement would still be continuing the way it is.
AA: So how do you decide what you do want to do? I think you do a lot of documentation.
HS: Yes.
AA: Is that a part of an assumption about the future, possibility of accountability? Is it, a way of just memorializing people’s lived experience? How are you thinking about the actual day-to-day work that you and your team are doing?
HS: Right. So, we, when we were first established our organization, it was with a transitional justice approach of North Korea’s going to change, collapse, unification, whatever form that is, and we need this database to be the foundation of what the victims want, there needs to be evidence of information, of documentation so that the victim’s voices aren’t forgotten. Twenty-one years since we established our organization, transition hasn’t happened, but we still apply that approach of, we don’t decide what this information will be used for. It can be used for accountability. And, some of our victim groups want that. And we recently, successfully won a domestic civil lawsuit in South Korea against the DPRK for some victim groups. Some just want it to be truth telling. They just want, you know, acknowledgement. Some want memorialization. We are working towards establishing a museum on North Korean human rights. Some want it to be a foundation for reparations in the form of psychosocial support or compensation. There can be so many different ways this documentation can be used. And that’s what we believe our role is, is that it’s documented and the victims, they’re the ones that decide what we do with it. So, and we face a lot of criticism for that because lots of donors, lots of other human rights groups want us to just share all the documentation that we have. They want us to completely open up our database, because we have the largest database on North Korean human rights records, just because we’ve been doing it for the longest, and lots of groups believe that if we opened up our database, then there’d be enough evidence to file something at the ICC or a universal jurisdiction case or whatever that may be. And that may be so, but it’s not up to us to decide.
AA: So it means that you are collecting this data, you’re documenting, you’re doing something that would be of evidentiary standard, but you have no constituency to whom you feel directly accountable. There’s no one to ask about whether this material can be shared for the purposes of accountability. It’s a strange situation. There’s a, a sort of great gap there. I mean, you could go on doing this indefinitely.
HS: Mm-Hmm. Yeah. I mean, at the moment it’s the direct information providers, the people who we interview. Our database has about 150,000 entries, and the majority of these entries are from North Korean escapees. So, they ultimately, at the moment, they’re the ones that get to decide whether we share information or not.
AA: Can you say something about what the entries are?
HS: So we divide them into cases of human rights violations and then information about individuals. So, what we call a North Korean human rights case could be a situation where it’s a human rights violation that has happened to a North Korean in North Korea. So, for example, a North Korean has been publicly executed for distributing a USB that has South Korean dramas on it. That could be an example of a North Korean case –
AA: USB being a jump drive that, it’s – it’s just a little thing you can plug into a laptop and people can, look at what’s on it.
HS: Yes. So, you know, Squid Game is one of the most watched shows on Netflix. The fact that we globally can access it, but North Koreans who speak the same language cannot, you know, and North Korea has criminalized watching South Korean content, and distributing it so that can be a human rights violation. But also if a North Korean has their human rights violated in China, um, trafficking, that is also for us a North Korean human rights case. So if the victim is North Korean, that’s what we document. But also if the perpetrator is North Korean. So there was an infamous incident of the US student Otto Warmbier who was caught taking down a poster in North Korea, detained, unfortunately comatosed and eventually passed away. That is documented in our database, even though the victim isn’t North Korean, the perpetrator is North Korean. So those are the cases. So we have about 85,000 cases. And then those are like divided up into different categories of like, right to education, right to- you know, they’re based on international human rights treaties. And then we have entries on individuals, on victims, perpetrators and witnesses. The majority of our entries are on victims. but we have about 2000 case entries on perpetrators. And these are for accountability purposes, could be for Magnitsky-style sanctions, it could be for cases, whatever form that can be used for in the future.
AA: And so this huge database is going to go on growing. Does it seem to you, as the guardian of all of that data that you need to help develop a, a kind of community or constituency that can guide its use? Or is it really just the technical task that you’ve set yourselves to keep this database resourced and growing until such time as a political change makes it potentially useful, or not?
HS: Yeah, I think, I think that the answer changes, and I think it used to be, at least from my perspective, I don’t know how the founders feel, it used to be more the latter of guarding it. But since we created our database in the early two thousands, the UN has also created its own repository. The South Korean government has also created its own archive. Not to name the countless other NGOs that were created after the COI report to also work on accountability purposes. So, aside from the other NGOs, there are the UN, the South Korean government and us who are all interviewing the same people and documenting the same human rights violations. And it can lead to, you know, revictimization, over-traumatization. And so I think now I’m more focused on, you know, the former of – I want the people that we’re interviewing to know why we’re interviewing them. I want them to be able to properly refuse. And I think that’s what I find that is quite different from other documentation organizations who come to try and like help us. In other human rights communities, a lot of the victims come forward and ask their situations and cases to be documented. I maybe I’m wrong, but I think that that’s what I’ve have heard. But with us, it’s us going out and trying to convince the community, trying to explain to North Koreans, “you have had your human rights violated; we would like to document these human rights violations for this purpose.” And many will say yes without fully understanding what that means.
AA: It’s really an unusual situation to have a constituency whose rights have been abused that is not clear about why they should share that information with you. I’m trying to understand what they might be thinking.
HS: It’s complex. When the big three agents, the UN, the South Korean government, us as a civil society organization, interview North Koreans, it’s when they’re in a facility operated by the South Korean government. So, when North Korean escapees first come to South Korea, the first thing that they undergo is one, an interrogation by the National Intelligence Service to make sure that they’re not spies. And secondly, they’re put in a resettlement facility where they learn how to be South Korean for three months. Um, and that’s when we get access to them. And coming from a place where they don’t know what a civil society organization is, they don’t know what consent is, they’ve never been able to say no before, this is the power balance – they will agree to it. And then there’s also, when they leave these resettlement facilities, a lot of groups, a lot of media, a lot of academics pay an honorarium to talk to them. And so there’s a financial aspect of it.
AA: So where does that leave you and your colleagues? Are you feeling as though in some way you might be part of a de facto coercive process?
HS: I think that’s something that we have been discussing internally a lot so we get given two hours to talk to the North Korean escapees. And you know, most of that time is just explaining who we are, making sure that they understand that they can say no to us. And sometimes that often means that they do say no to us, and so we leave with nothing.
AA: How often does that happen, do you think?
HS: It really, really depends. I think what we always want to make sure that is shared with them is that even if right now they don’t want to talk about it, later on, once they feel more settled and they perhaps have time to reflect, that they can always come talk to us. And that what differentiates us from the other documentation groups, is that we also provide psychosocial support. We also provide education programs. We also provide legal support. We take a holistic approach, and we’re the only group that has in-house counselors who are trained to understand the North Korean context and that it’s free counseling and that we will provide that support whenever it’s needed. And that, you know, they’re not just a source of information for us. I think it’s made our work a lot more difficult now that actually there’s so much more attention on the issue. I was talking to, somebody at the UN who not working on North Korea, how usually it’s civil society that’s the only one doing documentation and how can we get more governments involved and how can we get international organizations involved? And I wanted to remind them that there’s also a danger of, you know, too many cooks spoil the broth. Right? And that’s what we are finding, unless you are thinking about, “what is this documentation for? Who are you documenting for?” then just the documentation itself can be harmful and it can be exploitative, but people don’t want to have that conversation, I think.
AA: I mean, it’s very difficult to imagine that people who have experienced significant abuse of their rights should be in a place of passivity, that there’s little demand for the vindication of their rights or for redress. And I’m just puzzling, I’m just wondering where have I ever heard of that situation before? And if you’re close up and watching it, I’m just curious about what your own explanation is for that.
HS: I think it’s just because it’s so embedded in this North Korean society you know, something that we hear is, “oh, but if that’s a human rights violation, then everything is a human rights violation, then we’re all victims, then what does that mean for our people if everybody is a victim, if nobody has any rights?” Also, I think sometimes I think it can be quite difficult for North Koreans where, “do we want to remember the time we spent in North Korea as just this very dark period in which all of our human rights were violated and we had absolutely no freedoms? But it’s also where I had my birthdays, and that’s also where I grew up, and that’s also where my childhood was.” And it’s very conflicting of, its home. But if constantly that narrative of this evil, like dystopian place, I think that’s difficult.
AA: That that narrative is being pushed onto them as they come out of North Korea, (yes). They then experience a world in which whatever privations they went through, they’re still talking about a place where they lived a life with loved ones and with traditions, and they find that the environment around them is entirely hostile and negative about where they’ve come from.
HS: Right. And I think that’s, you know, that’s why we also don’t call them defectors because actually very few people left North Korea because they were like, “my human rights is being violated. I don’t agree with this political system. I’m defecting.” A lot of people leave purely for survival reasons, to reconnect with their family. Some are like almost accidental defections because they were just going to go to China very briefly. I don’t think many left with the idea, the notion that they are victims of this system. But once they come to South Korea and they get asked all these questions and this narrative is put on them, then they are like, “oh!” And so, you know, this isn’t something that we as an organization do, but I think another very powerful thing that other civil society groups do is information dissemination groups, is trying to show examples of what human rights violations could be in North Korea. Like getting people to realize that what they think is just ‘everyday’ isn’t okay. I think what really helps for North Korean escapees is when we give them concrete examples of what a human rights violation is, and then they realize that it’s something that they, you know, should have had protected.
AA: So having gone through this process of leaving without necessarily having a strong narrative of escaping repression, they have it explained to them what, what you are talking about. They talk about the extent to which those things have happened to them and then what? They’re in South Korea, and do they use that new insight to become mobilized and active? Or do they basically say, “I wish I had never had this conversation. I don’t want to know anything about it. I just wanted to live my life in an apolitical way.”
HS: I think the majority would fall into the latter group of they just want to be South Korean and they just want to get married and have a good job and start a new life. But I think what we’re seeing now, you know, 25, 30 years on since the first, you know, wave of North Koreans started resettling, is that they’re starting to reclaim the narrative of “actually maybe we, we should be talking about what we experienced.” And there is that movement growing. I think something that I worry about are the celebrity defectors who make a living off talking about North Korea, they get put on these like speaking tours and get given all these book deals and how much of that is something that they really want? Some do want it, but you know, is that the only way they’re able to own their identity as a North Korean? And I think that’s something that a lot of North Koreans and South Korea are talking about with the first North Korean Defector Day, July 14th this year,of “how do we share more about who we are as a community other than just being in this victim framework,” because the only success stories that you hear from the North Korean defector community are actually, many of them, were already elites in North Korea. So, one of the first elected national assemblymen from North Korea was a former North Korean diplomat who defected. And so he lived a very elite life in North Korea and came to South Korea and also lived a very elite – so you have like two extremes. And so I think what they’re pushing for, and what should happen, is this diversity in the North Korean defector-escapee community… of the 34,000 of them, some of them are victims and want to push forward that narrative. And some just want to be South Korean. Some want to really use that North Korean identity, some don’t. And you know, we have to respect that.
AA: So if you aren’t seeing a big demand for defense of rights from the North Korean escapees, do you have any prospect of building a constituency demanding North Korean rights in the South Korean population?
HS: Yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s tricky, right? It’s, it’s so much more effective if the affected community talks about it themselves. I can only do so much research and, interviews to talk about North Korea and tell the larger community, the South Korean community. And I think it, it has to come from North Koreans.
AA: And you don’t see just the natural sense of, yeah, distress about what’s happening in the north motivating a constituency of critique and demand without leadership coming from the escapee community?
HS: No, I mean, something I want to add on that I didn’t talk about, – there’s been a huge growth of North Korean-born YouTubers who, you know, are operating their own YouTube channels because they can say whatever they want to say and it’s not through a NGO and it’s not through this, you know, international funder or whatever. They make their own videos and they’re putting out the narrative that they want about North Korea and North Korean escapees. And I think that’s changing how young South Koreans see North Korea. And I think it’s too early on to see what the impact is, but I think it’d be really interesting to see how like YouTube and social media affects the way that young South Koreans view North Korea as well. I think South Koreans don’t want to hear how bad North Korea is anymore. They’re, they’re sick of it. They’re tired of that narrative. I think actually what helps is humanizing the issue a little bit more, reminding South Koreans that people are living there and it’s not just political prison camps and public executions every day. That’s what they’ve been hearing. That’s not what they want to hear anymore. And so we’re primarily a documentation organization, but we also do, you know, awareness campaigns and outreach to young students. And some of the most effective campaigns we have is this, you know, interactive platform that we have, it’s like a “choose your own adventure” game that we have of imagining you were born in North Korea and like spending a day in North Korea, what it’s like to be able to go to school. And that’s gotten much people much more interested than us sharing about political prison camps and executions.
AA: So at the level of human day-to-day empathy, how I would like to live my day, they can see the contrast there much more than with the kind of amped up, sort of shock-horror accounts.
HS: Exactly, Exactly. Yet what I think the media want is that shock horror sensationalist, like, 13 high school students were executed for watching a South Korean drama. That’s, that’s what most of the headlines are. But from our experience, that’s not what young South Koreans want to hear or get them more interested.
AA: So no big prospect of changes, but you are going to go on doing this documentation because that’s the task that’s in front of you until some other factor, like a growing constituency in South Korea emerges. For now it’s, it’s staying on the task and waiting.
HS: I think it’s just we believe that somebody needs to have this like sustainable continued approach to North Korean human rights because it’s so politicized in South Korea, regardless of what the political parties do on North Korean human rights and how the South Korean public and the North Korean escapees respond to it, somebody needs to do the day to day and document and have the foundation so that when one day something does happen, that foundation is there. I trust the North Korean people to be able to make that decision. And I think we’re there to make sure that they have the tools to be able to make those decisions in the future.
AA: Thank you, Hanna.
HS: Thank you.
AA: Hanna Song is the executive director of the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, in Seoul, South Korea, You can find a transcript of our conversation and some background reading suggestions, on our website, strengthandsolidarity.org
AA: If you’re a human rights lawyer, frustrated, even angry about the treatment your clients receive at the hands of the police, or the prosecution, or even the judge, and yet you know that you are going to have to work and be collegial with those actors for years to come, what should you do? For Zimbabwe human rights lawyer Arnold Tsunga, who has been in court defending activists more times than most of us have had hot dinners, the answer is simple. Invite them to a game of soccer.
Arnold Tsunga: We call it “social soccer” in Zimbabwe because of the fact that we use it to unwind and recharge our batteries and we normally do it every weekend. And I’ve also been very lucky to organize lawyers to constitute a team which we call Zim lawyers team.
AT: So we have an organizer within our team. His name is Chapo. And at any particular moment whether, for soccer, or if we want to use as an entry point to be able to have a good conversation about how to resolve disputes in some of the conflicts, including violations that will be seen in society. So Chapo organizes with the police. He organizes with the prosecuting authority. And they are fond of coming to play with us. So the battles that we fail to resolve in the courts, we then try to resolve them through social soccer in a collegial environment.
AT: I was born during the colonial era and condemned to rural Zimbabwe. And as a result of that, we didn’t have many sporting opportunities except playing soccer. Just to assemble a number of plastics and paper into a round thing. And then we kick it around as youngsters and the process, the culture of soccer developed. Early on, it also infused in us, the youngsters in the rural areas during a period of great injustice in our country, the basic principles of justice and fairness, because in playing soccer, you need an opponent, you can’t play soccer alone. So, the tolerance of having opposition is taught as a value, and it is as a principle and culture at the very early stages in life.
AT: It is not just an opponent. You also need rules that are pre-determined, that are clear, that are understood by the players themselves, but also understood by the referee who is basically the arbiter. So in that situation, you can’t play soccer unless both opponent and the other team are fully aware and in full agreement of what the rules are. And then, if the officiating person applies those rules in a manner that is irregular, unfair or wrong, it immediately creates conflict among the teams. And therefore, similar to society, because of being a lawyer, I could immediately relate when you then talk about the principle of the rule of law, in that the rule of law would suppose that the majority, if not all members of society, have to have a clear awareness of what the rules that govern their behavior is and how those rules get applied. And the judiciary, which is basically the arbitration and adjudication institution, also needs to apply those rules fairly, irrespective of the status power of the people before them. And so those are the principles that so taught me from the very beginning. So I’m not surprised that now as a way of unwinding from heavy workload of legal representation in particular, heavy workload on human rights, the thing that I go to is football.
AT: And the Zim lawyers team itself becomes a vehicle of accepting that, okay, we are one profession. The police could be different from us in that they are the ones who initiate prosecutions. When you go into court, we’re basically standing against each other, we defending our clients, them trying to insist on prosecution. And the same with prosecutors. Then the fair arbiter there is the judge. So what then happens is that if we organize ourselves in our difference between us as the lawyers and them as the police or prosecutors, we are accepting our difference, but even tolerating each other, that we constitute different teams, but we are interdependent in the execution of justice.
AT: It also depersonalizes some of the disputes and conflicts that we have as we grapple with whether these (are) violations of the rule of law or not. And then in the process, it humanizes all of us. And then I think once there is a question of humanization, it creates conditions where both the prosecution, the police and us, as lawyers, begin to understand that we are all officers of the court, and that our primary purpose is to achieve justice rather than to score points that are personal against each other. And then through that process, I think sport can be a very good instrument to really deal with the excesses of human rights abuses that we also experience in our society. And then that’s where I find the beauty of soccer.
AA: Veteran Zimbabwe human rights lawyer Arnold Tsunga demonstrating his fancy footwork on and off the field.
AA: And that’s Episode 48, thanks for listening. If you aren’t on our mailing list but would like to be added and receive the newsletter, please send a note to pod@strengthandsolidarity.org. – we’ll drop that address in the shownotes. For now, from producer Peter Coccoma and me, Akwe Amosu, see you next time.