Remarks at “Women’s Voices from North Korea: Repression and Resilience” a Panel Discussion with North Korean Defectors at the U.S. Mission

Thank you, everybody. It’s so important, and appreciated, that so many of you have come out to hear this incredibly important discussion. I am humbled to be among these amazing women who are here to tell their stories.

Thank you, Ambassador King, for the introduction and for what you do every day on behalf of human rights in North Korea. It really makes a difference to have somebody who wakes up every morning and all they think about in the U.S. government is the human rights crisis – catastrophic crisis – faced by the North Korean people.

I’d also like to single out our co-sponsors – Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the United Kingdom – not only for their help in organizing this event, but for helping us raise the profile of North Korea’s abysmal human rights record, and asking – through the Security Council and other UN venues – what more we can do about it. We can’t stop asking this question.

This is the first time we are holding a meeting specifically dedicated to women’s rights in North Korea. And today we will hear from four incredibly courageous individuals who managed to escape from North Korea, and whose experiences illustrate the tremendous hardships and serious abuses that people in that country – and in particular women – are forced to endure every day.

We are holding this meeting during a week in which members of governments, UN bodies, and civil society groups from around the world have convened here in New York to talk about how to knock down the enduring obstacles to women’s empowerment. Arguably nowhere in the world do we face a greater challenge in that effort than in North Korea. As the 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry concluded in its comprehensive report – which was based on more than 200 interviews with victims, eyewitnesses, experts, and former DPRK officials – the Government of North Korea is committing “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations…pursuant to policies established at the highest level of the State.” According to the Commission, even in a country whose repression, as they put it, “does not have any parallel in the contemporary world,” women are in a special “position of vulnerability.”

Today, I would like to speak very briefly to three of the areas in which the repressive system operated by the North Korean government makes women particularly vulnerable to abuse.

First, women are especially vulnerable to being trafficked. In a country where an estimated 25 percent of children under the age of five suffer from stunted growth as a result of chronic malnutrition, many women and girls flee the country simply to survive, or to try to help starving family members. Imagine the choices that women in North Korea are facing day to day. According to the Commission of Inquiry, traffickers exploit the desperate situation of these women, promising them jobs in other parts of North Korea or in neighboring countries – only to then sell them into forced marriages, domestic servitude, or to make them work as prostitutes after smuggling them out of the country. Other traffickers wait on the other side of North Korea’s border for women and girls to cross, abducting them and forcing them into exploitative situations. Women trapped in these relationships are routinely subjected to sexual and physical violence and rape. One trafficking survivor told the commission that, after being sold to a man in China, she spent the first six months locked in his house, where she was forced to have sex with him. “I begged him every time not to have sex,” she said, “but was beaten when I tried to resist.”

Even in harrowing circumstances like these, North Korean women are reluctant to seek help from authorities in other countries – fearing, not without reason, that they will be forcibly returned to their country, and subjected to even worse abuse at the hands of their own government. Indeed, again according to the COI, traffickers take advantage of the awareness among their victims of the threat of being forcibly returned by neighboring countries “to subdue their victims by threatening to report them to authorities if they resist.” This is a live concern that the Commission of Inquiry itself has documented.

This brings me to a second point: while all prisoners in North Korea’s gulags are subjected to appalling treatment, women who are forcibly returned are vulnerable to an especially grotesque form of abuse – what the Commission of Inquiry defined as “a widespread prevalence of forced abortion and infanticide.” One witness told the commission that, when North Korean authorities at a detention facility discovered that she was pregnant after being forcibly returned, she was subjected to an abortion without any anesthetic, “by a woman,” as she put it, “using her hands and rusty equipment.” When the woman cried out in pain during the operation, prison authorities told her that she was forbidden from making noise. She was compelled to go back to work on the very same day, in spite of the fact that she was bleeding profusely and experiencing crippling pain. The operation left her infertile for the rest of her life. Utterly distressing as these accounts are – they are not isolated; some of the women you will hear from today witnessed similar abuses.

Of course, North Korean women are vulnerable to horrific abuse not only when they are trafficked or forcibly returned to the DPRK, but also in virtually every part of their daily lives. And this is my third and final point: as the Commission of Inquiry concluded, “Discrimination against women remains pervasive in all aspects of society.” Look no further than the experiences of the women on today’s panel. When one of them was a small girl, her father stole her bookbag and sold it to buy food, which he did not share. Another woman you will hear from today was married to a man who took their only child and, without telling her, sold the small boy to a wealthy family – for a little money and two bars of soap. Their own son. Her boy. Yet she was completely powerless to get her child back – or even to find out where he had been taken – you can’t talk about one’s kids…I don’t know how you talk about it, I can’t talk about it – no matter how determined she was to find him. To this day, she does not know what happened to her son, or where he is. And that boy, now a young man, does not know who his real mother is. As a mother myself, obviously, I cannot imagine this – probably the most devastating act that could befall a person.

To hear just some of what women and girls must endure in North Korea can feel overwhelming. Yet consider this: women who have endured so many of these abuses – women who were trafficked, beaten, and sexually assaulted; women who were forcibly returned to North Korea, imprisoned in forced labor camps, and whose kids were taken from them – are sitting right next to me here up on this stage. These women endured; they fought to escape – even after being sent back several times; and they made it out. Not only that – they are willing to endure smears, threats, and attacks to tell what happened to them, so that the world can know how the North Korean government treats its own people. And they have made it their life’s work to help people like them, who have not been able to escape. We are truly in awe of their bravery and their selflessness.

The majority of people who flee the DPRK are women – affording them a powerful role in giving voice to the millions of other women and men like them, who remain trapped in North Korea.

There is another reason we should not feel completely disheartened on hearing today’s testimonies. More than ever before, we are systematically cataloguing these injustices. What began with the comprehensive Commission of Inquiry report – and continued with the first ever UN Security Council meeting on the human rights situation in North Korea in December 2014, which is now a permanent item on the Security Council’s agenda – continues with today’s meeting. It is further advanced by the UN Human Rights Office in Seoul, which opened last June, and is collecting more testimonies like the ones we will soon hear. The message this persistent attention sends to the perpetrators is clear: We are building our evidence against you, and the case files keep growing. When the day comes when you will be held accountable – and that day will come – we will be ready.

Not only is more information about conditions in the country getting out of North Korea – more information from our world is making it into North Korea, including through the black market. As the North Korean government’s single-minded focus on producing weapons of mass destruction continues to degrade its already ravaged economy and public distribution system, the black market has become crucial to the survival of many families. These markets are dominated by women, and increasingly girls, who have become the main breadwinners for their families, and the main conduits of such information – whether it is carried on DVDs or USBs. And the more North Koreans see of the rest of the world, even in limited glimpses, the more they will demand their daily reality look more like it, daunting though it must seem. We must do everything within our power to ensure more North Koreans get to see what their lives could be like.

A last word: Over recent months, as you all know, North Korea has made a lot of headlines for carrying out a proscribed nuclear test, making it the only nation in the world to carry out such a test in the 21^st century – and not just once, it has done so four times – and for conducting launches using proscribed ballistic missile technology. In response, two weeks ago the Security Council imposed on North Korea the strongest sanctions in a generation.

In further defiance, North Korea last night carried out additional launches using proscribed ballistic missile technology – flagrant violations that the Security Council will hold urgent consultations to discuss shortly after this meeting.

As North Korea continues its dangerous pursuit of nuclear weapons, some will argue that North Korea’s security and human rights situations are somehow unrelated. This is absurd. It is no coincidence that the North Korean government would rather grow its nuclear weapons program than grow its own children. Indeed, many of North Korea’s systematic human rights violations deliberately underwrite the government’s nuclear program, including the forced labor carried out by tens of thousands of men, women, and children, as well as by workers deployed overseas. North Korea continues to demonstrate what we have said repeatedly: governments that so flagrantly violate the human rights of their own people can be expected to show similar disdain for the international norms that help ensure our shared security.

And with that, let me give the floor to our moderator, journalist Robert Boynton, who will introduce our four very special, remarkable guests. Thank you.

Source: U.S Department of State

By

Robert Williams

Editor in Chief