They just keep pouring in (Via. The Korea Liberator)

(North Korea Freedom Week Event)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SENDING THE MESSAGE OF HOPE TO NORTH KOREA:
Free North Korea Radio

WHEN: Thursday, April 27 at 1 p.m. (note earlier time to accommodate Congressional hearing witnesses, Members of Congress, attendees)
WHEN: 2168 Rayburn House Office Building (across the hall from the Congressional Hearing).

TO: MEMBERS OF THE PRESS AND OTHER INTERESTED FRIENDS

Free North Korea Radio director Kim Seung-Min and Dong Chol Choi, Washington director for the Exile Committee for North Korea Democracy, will announce their efforts to reach out to the North Korean people through increased radio broadcasting into North Korea.

Congressman Joseph Pitts, dignitaries from the government of Japan, members of both Korean and Japanese Abductees, and Korean War POW rescue movements will join to show solidarity for the defectors’ based program. All key leadership of the Exile Committee for North Korean Democracy (the visiting North Korean defectors’ delegation) will be present.

The event will he hosted by the Defense Forum Foundation president Suzanne Scholte and Gil Chung of Free North Korea Radio-USA as part of the events being held this week for NORTH KOREA FREEDOM WEEK.

Food and Refreshments will be available and the public is invited.

RSVP: pamelat@inebraska.com

Thanks to Finals, I’m missing a great deal. Hopefully, the summer offers something else.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a press release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Amanda Abrams
Washington, DC, April 26, 2006

On Thursday, April 27, 2006, Freedom House will co-host a reception to welcome participants of North Korea Freedom Week and acknowledge the contributions US Congressional leaders, visiting Japanese Parliamentarians, and NGO leaders from the US, Japan, and South Korea have made to the issue of human rights in North Korea.

Reps. Ed Royce (R-CA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) will co-host the reception, which will be held at 5:30 pm in the Rayburn House Office Building Cafeteria. Speakers include Jennifer Windsor, Executive Director of Freedom House; both cosponsoring members of Congress; Shu Watanabe of the Democratic Party of Japan; and Suzanne Scholte from the North Korea Freedom Coalition.

“While the appalling human rights abuses occurring in North Korea have not yet been fully recognized by most of the world, there are a number of individuals and NGOs who have doggedly focused on the issue and deserve our recognition,” said Ms. Windsor. “It is vital, however, that we continue to raise international awareness of the horrifying conditions under which most North Koreans live,” she added.

Last May, Freedom House launched a year-long international campaign to bring the human rights abuses occurring in North Korea to the attention of concerned citizens, governments and non-governmental organizations worldwide. Activities have included a trio of conferences in Washington, DC, Brussels, and Seoul; a US university tour for North Korean defector and noted author Kang Cheol Hwan, who also met with number of government and NGO leaders; and support to a grassroots advocacy group that hosts North Korean awareness events and initiatives throughout the world.

Last week, Freedom House sent a letter to President Bush urging him to raise the issue of China’s treatment of North Korean refugees when meeting with Chinese President Hu.

North Korea Freedom Week, occurring this week, draws thousands of activists from around the world to highlight the brutality of the North Korean regime, where human rights abuses include torture, arbitrary execution, and the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of North Koreans in political gulags. Freedom in the World, Freedom House’s annual survey of political rights and civil liberties in countries around the world, has given North Korea the lowest possible score in both categories since the publication began in 1972.

Freedom House is an independent non-governmental organization that supports the expansion of freedom in the world.

For more information about North Korea, visit:

Freedom in the World 2005
Freedom of the Press 2005

This sums up how I feel about the world’s skepticism

History has set an alarming precedent: Witnesses to atrocities are rarely believed, and even when there is insurmountable evidence of crimes against humanity, states are alarmingly slow to act if they act at all.

The scene has been enacted time and time again. Someone witnesses the development of genocidal policies in a totalitarian state or observes extreme, systematic violence, often backed by the local establishment, that targets a group of people. The witness speaks out, hoping to stop the atrocities. The pleas fall on deaf ears.

In mid-1943, when wartime courier Jan Karski emerged from occupied Poland with detailed eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust, he was met with skepticism. At a meeting with three of the Roosevelt administration’s most influential Jews, Karski told the story that he had risked his life to tell. No less than Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter told him to his face: “I am unable to believe you.”

More than 50 years after Lenin’s establishment of the extensive system of Soviet labor camps known as the Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote the definitive work on the subject, “The Gulag Archipelago.” His opus stemmed from eight years of his own experience, as well as meticulous notes from the experiences of perhaps hundreds of other inmates. Yet, in the West, his book also met with skepticism and sometimes with outright resistance.

As if the lessons of the 20th century have not taught that humanity is capable of mass destruction upon itself,the world finds itself faced with stories of real genocides and all it does is shrug it off once again. Genocides in places like North Korea and Sudan should not be “discovered” decades later in some publication. “We didn’t know” has cost millions of lives in the past, do not allow it to take more lives.