The North Korean famine in the mid-1990s led to the deaths of 1-2 million people. More than 10 years later, severe food shortages still persist. Families and children are still going hungry, severely malnourished and dying.
NGOs have developed “daycare” centers to care for children while their parents are working jobs. These centers ensure that the children are FREE from starvation and get at least one meal a day of soy milk and fresh bread. Many of these children are actually orphans. Help support these organizations at Peridot on Friday, May 8th!
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Be prepared to get your drink and dance on long into the night!
DJ LYON will be spinning sick beats all night long to get your body groovin’!
Advanced Ticket Sales are available at the UT main campus, Robart’s Library on Monday April 27th and Wednesday 29th from 1-5 p.m. Advanced tickets are $10, Members/Guestlist are $15, and tickets at the door are $20.
To pick up tickets please call: 647-668-0441 or 647-261-0643
Advanced tickets are limited so get them ASAP!
For guestlist or event info please contact us at info@hanvoice.org
For those of you who can read Korean, follow this link to read the May 5th story in Radio Free Asia about the recent activities of Canadian NGOs – including HanVoice – for North Korean human rights. Our May 2nd protest during the North Korea Freedom Week spurred on this story. Stay tuned for more news about our work, for there will be much more!
Hope to see many of you at the Freedom Party tonight!!!
TIME magazine discusses why the U.S. should engage in diplomatic relations with North Korea – and it looks like they just might (have to). North Korea has been engaging in some very threatening behaviour, and though it has certainly been disturbing, it seems to be leading to a diplomatic path. Excerpt from the story:
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il KCNA / Reuters
“On April 5, Pyongyang fired a missile disguised as a satellite directly over Japan and into the Pacific, in direct contravention of a 2006 U.N. resolution forbidding the North’s ballistic missile program. Then [...] the U.N. Security Council issued what amounted to a strongly worded letter straight out of Team America: World Police condemning the missile test. The North, in response, called this “an unbearable insult,” and said it would again fire up its reactor at Yongbyon, the source of fissile material for the North’s suspected small arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Finally, yesterday, Pyongyang threw out monitors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and said the so-called six-party talks [...] were over. Not only would the North no longer participate, it would no longer abide by anything that it had previously agreed to during the talks, which includes the dismantling of the Yongbyon reactor. (See pictures of North Koreans at the polls.)
They know that even in Pyongyang, North Korean officials have access to the Internet. If they cared to, they could have read yesterday’s New York Times, which reported that the Obama Administration is considering dropping the U.S. demand that Iran cease enriching uranium before any direct Washington-Tehran talks about Iran’s nuclear program. This would explicitly reverse the Bush Administration’s position that talks could start only after the enriching stopped. “If you’re the North Koreans and you read that, you’re naturally going to ask, ‘Why not deal directly with us too?’ ” says an East Asian diplomat seasoned in North Korea diplomacy.
It’s likely the White House shares this view, even though in public it has harped on getting the North Koreans back to the six-party format. This is probably no longer possible, after Pyongyang’s announcement yesterday. So the trick for Obama now is twofold. He must figure out how much time to let pass before trying to re-engage the North [...]
Once talks begin, the U.S. ought to be willing to put a range of blandishments on the table — just as it has in the past. Economic aid, security guarantees and, down the road, even diplomatic recognition for North Korea — all that would be available to Pyongyang, so long as it verifiably stands down its nuclear program and curbs its missile exports.
Below is the Voice of America video story of the North Korean artist, Sun Mu, who uses his paintings to parody the North Korean propaganda.
We posted a more detailed profile of him in this post, but it’s good to see more of his paintings and to hear him describe his artistic works.
Also, the North Korean pianist Cheol-Woong Kim’s Carnegie Hall debut is this Friday, April 17th. He will be performing Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky. If you happen to be in New York City this weekend, you might like to check it out!
As seen in our recent post (“Radio Can Lead North Korean People to Change their Society”), this story in the LA Times again reports that radio may be one of the most effective ways to reach North Koreans:
The small operations in South Korea aim to be voices of change by airing information to counter Pyongyang's propaganda and by passing messages from friends and relatives to North Koreans.
““News out of Pyongyang violates the basics of journalism,” he said. “We tell the other side of the story.”
Howard’s station is among half a dozen Seoul-based operations that each day dispatch news and opinions into North Korea. Some, like Open Radio [Web site in Korean; watch or read the CNN video interview here], are the work of concerned outsiders. Others are run by defectors, many of whom use pseudonyms because they know vengeful officials could persecute family and friends left behind. [...]
Experts are divided on the role the radio stations play in the lives of North Koreans. Some call them tools of change, while others say their operators are frustrated defectors shouting into the wind.
“They might not be able to bring the kind of change that, say, subversive radio played in Eastern Europe in the 1970s, but they have an effect,” said Andrei Lankov, a professor specializing in North Korean history at Seoul’s Kookmin University.
Others dismiss the dispatches as a stream of invective against North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and his minions.
“You have to look at the origin of a lot of these refugee broadcasters,” said Brian Myers, an assistant professor at Dongseo University in Busan and an expert on the North’s propaganda.
“What somebody from the poorest part of North Korea says is not relevant to the elite in Pyongyang,” he said. “It’s like if someone from Appalachia fled the U.S. and began broadcasting their opinions into the U.S. from Canada. I don’t think they do a very sophisticated job.” [...]
Defectors who are now radio journalists insist that the medium is the best way to influence events back home.
Kim Dae-sung, station director for Free North Korea Radio [read the CNN coverage of them here] in Seoul, says his life changed in 1996 when, as a young engineer in the North, he bought a radio on the black market.
It was a Sony, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. He tucked it inside his clothes and hid his earphones under a wool cap. He became addicted to the radio’s connection to the world outside.
“I would see things that were wrong in North Korea, but I couldn’t speak out,” said Kim, who uses a pseudonym. “The radio spoke out.”
His radio also showed him a way out. One report mentioned a South Korean consulate that had just opened in a nearby city in China. He defected there and years later settled in Seoul.
Now, more than half of his 20 radio station employees are fellow defectors.
“Radio changed my life, my philosophy, my ideas,” he said.
Concrete rewards for the radio operators’ efforts are infrequent but inspirational, like the day Howard heard from a North Korean defector in China who said he had been a frequent listener to his station.
“I realized,” Howard said, “that someone out there was hearing us.”"
Keep up with more breaking news at twitter.com/HanVoice.
It’s no news, but it certainly is true and rampantly so.
Read this shocking story of female North Korean refugees in The Korea Times:
Photograph from Alberta Rose (http://degenerasian.blogspot.com)
“Female North Koreans who escaped the starving Stalinist country often become a target of human trafficking and are sold to rural China, usually to farmers who cannot find a wife, at prices as low as $446, Dong-A Ilbo reported Saturday.
The practice, at least 10 years old, is usually arranged when a rural farmer places the “order” with a human trafficking organization with “specification” of a woman he wants, including age and appearance.”
A Chinese man who currently lives with a North Korean woman said, “The organization that I contacted for a North Korean woman and the organization another village man contacted for the same purpose were different. So, it seems that there are a number of such organizations involving in the business.”
North Korean women who entered China were often lured by a human-trafficking broker who proposed a “lucrative job.” They were first gathered in the northeastern city Yanji, then were sent to the nearby city of Jilin before being transported to various Chinese cities where the “order” was placed, the newspaper said.
The price for a North Korean woman ranges from $446 to $1,488, the newspaper said, citing Chinese men who live with North Korean female refugees, North Korean women and Chinese officials.
Keep up with more breaking news at twitter.com/HanVoice.
Last Sunday, we had a very special evening with Cheol-Woong Kim, the North Korean pianist whom you read about in our previous post. Read about the evening in this National Post story.
This is also the first mention of HanVoice and its work in the “mainstream” media. Please share it as much as possible through e-mail, facebook, twitter, your own web sites! It is a great story, and the more people read stories like this, the closer we are to affecting real change for the North Korean people.
Cheol-Woong Kim: The Power of Music
Cheol-Woong Kim says he is probably the only working pianist who has calluses on his fingers.
Once, the prodigious musician and North Korean native enjoyed a life of decadence compared to the less fortunate majority in his home country. Kim was born as a loyal – the upper echelon in North Korea’s three-tiered caste system. Below him were the wavering, and below them were the hostile, who today spend much of their time languishing in Gulag-esque prisons.
Kim began studying piano at Pyongyang University at the age of eight …
The two US journalists detained in North Korean prison are now being tried for “illegal” and “hostile” acts (allegedly crossing the river and entering North Korea). If convicted, they face 10 years of forced labour. North Korea is said to be using the fate of these journalists as a diplomatic bargaining chip. North Korea has in the past freed Americans it has detained but only after diplomatic intervention.
Reporters Without Borders has launched an online petition for the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, which can be signed here.
Keep up with more breaking news at twitter.com/HanVoice.
- from The Daily NK: North Korean experts suggest that through radio programs broadcast into North Korea, the people can be separated from the regime.
“Radio Can Lead North Korean People to Change their Society”
The discussion cosponsored by the Citizens United for Better Society and Open Radio for North Korea on Tuesday on the topic of 'How can fundamental changes be induced in North Korea?'
President of Radio Free Chosun (RFC) Lee Kwang Baek was speaking at a discussion cosponsored by the Citizens United for Better Society and Open Radio for North Korea on Tuesday on the topic of “How can fundamental changes be induced in North Korea?” He hypothesized, “Radio broadcasting can galvanize North Korean people to acknowledge North Korean societal problems and the direction of the society’s future.”
Lee pointed out, “Awareness changes in the residents of the former U.S.S.R. and Eastern European society were incited by radio broadcasts which transferred information from the outside world. It is the most effective media for driving the North’s closed society into change.”
An elaboration of this discussion can be found here, an interview with Kim Dae Sung, the Director of Free North Korea Broadcasting.
Keep up with more breaking news at twitter.com/HanVoice.
Here is our new video featuring the North Korean pianist, Kim Cheol-Woong. Since fleeing to South Korea in 2003, he has been bringing awareness to the human rights crisis in North Korea through his musical performances and speeches around the world. Check out our new video, and please feel free to post it on your facebook, twitter, anywhere you can share it with others!
Read more about Mr. Kim:
“A Musician Flees North Korea for Cultural Freedom” – New York Sun, May 23, 2008.
“North Korean defector’s flight to musical freedom” – International Herald Tribune, December 17, 2008.
“Exiled because of his passion for jazz” – Freemuse, April 06, 2006.
[Update: Also check out the National Post coverage of our evening with him.]
For those of you who are near the Greater Toronto Area, he is giving a concert this Saturday, March 28th, at Toronto Centre for the Arts, George Weston Recital Hall, at 8pm. E-mail info@hanvoice.org if you would like to buy tickets to this concert.
He is also giving a concert at Carnegie Hall in April.
Our main campaign video at the moment, “This is the Truth”, is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ddhSbnrsc
The two American journalists Laura Ling, rigtht, and Euna Lee. Ling and Lee were detained by North Korean soldiers while on a reporting trip earlier in the week near the country's border with China, South Korean news reports said Thursday, March 19, 2009.(AP Photo/Yonhap)
Asian-American reporters covering the North Korean refugee issue are being detained by North Koreans. From the Associated Press:
” Tales about life on the run from repressive North Korea — women who end up at the mercy of human traffickers, children who grow up in hiding — drew the team of American reporters to the Chinese-North Korean border.
“Spent the day interviewing young N. Koreans who escaped their country. Too many sad stories,” journalist Laura Ling of the San Francisco-based online news outlet Current TV wrote on her Twitter page.
But their quest to document the plight of North Korean refugees may have put them in danger. Ling and fellow reporter Euna Lee were still missing Saturday, four days after they reportedly were seized by North Korean soldiers along the border.”
We sincerely hope for their safe and immediate return – our thoughts go out to the two brave reporters and their families.
Hopefully this news will also bring more international attention to the plight of the North Korean refugees, which is the very story these journalists were trying to cover.
Read the story here.
Keep up with more breaking news at twitter.com/HanVoice.
From left, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il
Washington Post’s weekend magazine Parade released its 2009 list of the world’s worst dictators. Kim Jong-Il rated 3rd on the list, after Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.
You can read more about the list here and check out the list here.
- See our twitter page for NK and NK refugee news updates.
from the Reuters:
Sudan, whose president has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, and North Korea are among the world’s eight most repressive societies, a U.S. human rights body said Monday.
. . .
“Within these entities, state control over daily life is pervasive and wide-ranging, independent organizations and political opposition are banned or suppressed, and fear of retribution for independent thought and action is part of daily life,” Freedom House said.
Check out the rest of the article here.
- See our twitter page for NK and NK refugee news updates.
Some of us went to a moving talk by Mike Kim, the author of Escaping North Korea. He talked in depth about helping North Koreans get to safety and the lives of North Koreans in China, where women are trafficked and abused. Most of the refugees were leaving because of medical reasons. Read more about Mike Kim and Escaping North Korea here.
From http://www.escapingnorthkorea.com/:
Mike Kim is the founder of Crossing Borders, an NGO providing aid to North Koreans. After helping refugees for the past four years, he now travels and speaks widely to raise awareness of their plight. Kim resides in Washington, DC, where he is a full-time MBA student at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
“The power of ‘Escaping North Korea’ stems from the stories Mr. Kim tells. During his four years in China, he met hundreds of escapees from the North. He reconstructs their tales — of the privations of daily existence in North Korea, of life on the lam in China — in heartbreaking detail… There are many heroes in Mr. Kim’s book, not least the author himself.” —The Wall Street Journal
“His intrepid effort to help four North Korean teenagers avoid arrest and repatriation on the journey from northern China to the British consulate in Shanghai is riveting, as is his insider knowledge of the perilous route refugees navigate across the borders of China, Laos and Thailand.” —Publishers Weekly
“This is an inspiring yet tragic study of the brave few in North Korea who have chosen to vote with their feet to leave the earth’s most repressive regime. An important and accessible piece of work, it should be read by generalists and specialists alike.” —Victor Cha, Georgetown University
“It is impossible to read the remarkable stories of personal suffering, endurance, and courage in these pages without believing that more can and must be done to help the North Korean people. It is not bad strategy or poor diplomatic practice to place human rights at the top of our agenda with Pyongyang and to challenge the rest of the international community to do the same.” —Michael J. Green, former special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Asian affairs, National Security Council
Escaping North Korea facebook page
- See our twitter page for NK and NK refugee news updates.
We hope to see you all at the screening of “Crossing” on Thursday. We CAN make a difference!
A chilling evidence of life in North Korea. Read the article here.
Seventy-six percent of surveyed North Korean defectors say they have witnessed public executions in their homeland, South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission said yesterday … North Korea punishes anti-government activity, circulation of outside information, theft and illicit sale of state property, robbery, human trafficking and murder with public execution, the report said.
- See our twitter page for NK and NK refugee news updates.
North Korean Killing Fields – A modern-day Mauthausen: Camp 22, North Korea, a hidden place of death and torture for the 50,000 men, women, and children who live and die there.
Watch this guerilla footage of the Yodok concentration camp.
For more videos, see our Multimedia page.
Check out this Washington Post article from March 6 on the hunger crisis that’s been plaguing North Korea for over a decade.
Teenage boys fleeing the North in the past decade are on average five inches shorter and weigh 25 pounds less than boys growing up in the South, according to measurements taken at a settlement center for defectors in South Korea.
Mental retardation caused by malnutrition will disqualify about a quarter of potential military conscripts in North Korea, … hunger-caused intellectual disabilities among the young are likely to cripple economic growth, even if the country opens to the outside world or unites with the South.
- See our twitter page for NK and NK refugee news updates.
On Thursday, March 19th HanVoice welcomes you to our largest and most anticipated event yet! HanVoice will be hosting a sreening of Crossing at Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor Street West on Bathurst).
Crossing is the first major film to capture the North Korean refugee situation and denial of human rights in North Korea, and is South Korea’s official entry for the 2009 Oscar Best Foreign Language Film category.
Tickets are $10 for HanVoice members and ambassadors, and $15 for non-members (memberships will be sold during event night). There is also a group rate of $10 per ticket for a group of 10 people or more. –> Go to our Facebook event page.
Crossing is a human drama based on real events. Yong-soo, a former soccer hero, is happy to raise his family in the abject poverty prevalent in his North Korean village. After his wife falls ill with tuberculosis and with no medicine available, Yong-soo has no choice but to cross the border between North Korea and China — leaving his son to take care of his dying mother.
By crossing the border without permission, Yong-soo commits an act of treason under North Korean law. By crossing the border, he instantly becomes a refugee under international law. But the Chinese authorities do not recognize any North Koreans as refugees and desperately repatriate all North Koreans they capture.
Director Tae-kyun Kim (Volcano High) filmed on location in China and Mongolia, bringing to the screen a tale that is all too familiar to the tens of thousands of North Koreans who have succeeded in escaping both North Korea and China. The depiction of political repression, the plight of the refugees, and the prison camps remind us of the fate of the hundreds of thousands of North Koreans who have not.”
Watch the movie trailer for Crossing here!
Came across this NY Times profile on Sun Mu, a North Korean artist who defected from North Korea in 1998. It’s stirring up lots of controversy in South Korea, but the story of an artist protesting through his art is still powerful.
“After Fleeing North Korea, an Artist Parodies Its Propaganda”
By CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: February 20, 2009
Choe Sang-Hun/The International Herald Tribune. “I cannot help being political. How can I ignore the reality of the North, where my parents are still suffering?”
IN one of Sun Mu’s best-known paintings from his “Happy Children” series, uniformed North Korean kindergartners sing like birds huddled together on a clothesline, their beaming faces so alike they could be clones. At the bottom of the posterlike image, a red slogan leaps out against a yellow background: “We are all happy children!”
When Sun Mu, an artist from North Korea who uses a pseudonym for security reasons, first exhibited paintings like this in Seoul two years ago, the police showed up to investigate. They had been tipped off by viewers who, missing the intended irony, were upset by what they took to be Communist propaganda — a possible crime under South Korea’s national security laws. After all, rapturously smiling child performers are a familiar feature of North Korean pageants, and the style mimics posters celebrating the North’s authoritarian regime.
“I’m not pro-Communist, far from it,” said Sun Mu, 36, who fled North Korea in 1998 to escape famine and arrived in the South in 2001. “When people look at my paintings, I hope they can hear the children asking, ‘Do you really think we’re happy?’ ”
Sun Mu, who was trained to create posters and murals for the Communist government, is the first defector from the North to have won fame as a painter in the South by applying that same propagandistic style to biting parodies of the North Korean regime.
His renown, however, is shaded by political concerns. In addition to adopting a pseudonym, he refuses to allow his face to be photographed, afraid that the family he left behind might face reprisals for his art. South Korean news outlets often refer to him as the “faceless” or “nameless” artist from North Korea.
His work has not always been well received.
Soon after his arrival in 2001 he enrolled at Hongik University, a leading arts institution in Seoul, where his socialist-realist technique put him at odds with prevailing notions of what constituted art. One of his professors called his political imagery “cheap, fit for old barbershops” — a reference to the cold war years when South Korean barbershops often were decorated with crude propaganda posters with slogans like “Let’s exterminate Communists!”
Now, many here say that imagery, with its subverted content, addresses issues central to Korean identity. “His work touches the national trauma of the divided Korea,” said Kim Dong-il, a visual arts critic and lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul. “His style is North Korean, but when he brought it to South Korea it became something completely different. The children’s smiles in his paintings become too idealized to be real. A smile is not always an expression of happiness, and can even mean the opposite.”
Sun Mu’s paintings have also depicted his own fearful journey across the river border into China in 1998, and the plight of a shackled North Korean defector who was repatriated to North Korea from the same Laotian prison where he himself was detained before proceeding on to Thailand and eventually to South Korea.
So far, however, his signature work has been the “Happy Children” series, with its relentlessly smiling North Korean youngsters. The smile has been variously interpreted by commentators as grotesque, a joke on the collectivism of North Korea, or a mask to hide the helplessness many North Koreans feel.
SUN MU said he used to wear that smile himself. In North Korea, he and his classmates smilingly sang hymns to Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, and would march out to perform for soldiers and farmers toiling in the fields. “They teach you how to smile that regimented smile — there’s a certain way to shape your mouth,” he said. “We children thought we were happy. We didn’t realize that our smile was fabricated and manufactured.”
Later, while serving in the North Korean Army, Sun Mu was assigned to create propaganda paintings. He produced images of North Korean soldiers cutting the throats of American soldiers or crushing Japanese invaders.
“One of the rules was that South Korean puppet soldiers be depicted as small and inconsequential at the corner of the canvas and running away from North Korean soldiers,” he said with a chuckle. “We’d finish off our paintings by adding slogans like ‘Let’s defend our revolutionary leadership with our lives!’ ”
He was an art student in college when he decided to flee North Korea, during a famine in the late 1990s that is thought to have killed two million people.
SOME of the political satire in his current output is hard to miss. In one painting, a woman raising her middle finger is naked except for the North Korean flag slipping off her body. Nudity is strictly forbidden in the North, denounced as capitalist decadence.
Sun Mu paints something else he could never have dared to depict in the North: portraits of Mr. Kim and his father, North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung. In the North, portraits of the Kims are considered sacred, and only a few artists are authorized to paint them.
In any case, the official portraits would never look like these. In one, Kim Jong-il is dressed not in his trademark Mao-style suit but in a pink Nike sports jacket, red Adidas pants and mismatched running shoes. Mr. Kim is transformed from supreme leader to bourgeois loafer.
Nonetheless, displaying the Kims’ images has also proved controversial.
When Sun Mu presented a portrait of Kim Il-sung titled “Sun of Korea” at an international biennale last September in Pusan, the South Korean organizers removed it at the last minute, saying they wanted to avoid potential problems with a “pro-Communist” painting.
At an exhibition in 2007, South Korean viewers objected to a Sun Mu portrait of Kim Jong-il that carried the title “God of Korea.” They apparently did not notice that the North Korean flag in the background had been hung upside down.
Sun Mu is undeterred.
“I cannot help being political,” he said. “How can I ignore the reality of the North, where my parents are still suffering? I would like to believe that art can change the world in whatever little way it can.”
