Land urges pressure on China to help North Koreans
- Apr 15, 2005 - comment
ERLC Resident Richard Land joined Sen. Sam Brownback, R.-Kan., and other human rights advocates April 7 in calling for action on behalf of North Korean refugees who escape to China. They urged pressure on China to protect refugees fleeing North Korea, a communist dictatorship ruled over by Kim Jong Il and widely considered the world’s most oppressive regime.
The calls for action at the Capitol Hill news conference followed a screening of two public executions secretly recorded and smuggled out of North Korea. The video, which was telecast first by the Japan Independent News Network, showed the executions by firing squad of two people March 1 and one person March 2. The executions took place after brief, outdoor trials at sites in North Korea near the Chinese border. Those executed apparently had helped refugees cross the border into China.
While Land, Brownback and others condemned North Korea’s act of executing its citizens for non-capital crimes, the focus of their criticism was China’s refusal to protect the refugees. China has been returning North Korean refugees to their home country, where they face imprisonment, torture and sometimes death.
“There is only one reason [the North Korean government] continues to exist, and it’s because of the support of China, and it is time that the international community shame China and put some pressure behind the shame,” Land said.
“It is time for us to call China to account, not just through protests but through concrete methods,” he said. If China continues to act in an uncivilized way toward its own people and North Korean refugees, “it is time for those of us who are resolved to do what we can to insist that the considerable influence and the considerable resources of the United States are on the side of the oppressed and not the oppressors, to develop creative ways to force China to choose between its continued support for the regime of Kim Jong Il and its own economic progress.
“We become partly responsible for the oppression when we continue to treat an oppressor nation as if it were a civilized one,” Land said.
The methods could include economic boycotts, calls for relocation of the 2008 Olympics set for Beijing or a boycott of the Olympics, Land said.
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