Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate is lit up for a concert by the band U2 on Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009. On Monday the city will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. (AP Photo)
(CNSNews.com) – As Germany prepares to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, activists in South Korea will hold a series of events this weekend to highlight calls for similarly momentous developments leading to the liberation of North Korea.
 
Planned events include a mass human rights and democracy demonstration led by North Korean refugee leaders in Seoul on Saturday; an all-day national day of prayer, fasting and repentance on Sunday; and another demonstration on Monday at the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas, calling for the North’s liberation.
 
A spokesman for the organizers said from Seoul on Friday that North Korean refugee organizations, groups focusing on North Korean human rights, and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were participating in the “UnifyKorea2009” events.
 
“Our South Koreans will be awakened by North Korean realities very rapidly,” he said. “Our society will be challenged.”
 
The spokesman said the issue went beyond the Korean peninsula. The “immeasurable sufferings” endured by North Koreans should be a matter of international concern.
 
The events are timed to coincide with the anniversary of “the three days which led to the opening of East Germany’s border and the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
 
With communism crumbling across Eastern Europe and following weeks of unrest, East German authorities on Nov. 9 1989 announced that citizens were free to travel directly to the West. Within hours, masses had gathered at the Wall where vastly outnumbered border guards allowed them to cross freely to West Berlin for the first time since 1961.
 
Almost a year later, on Oct. 3, 1990, Germany was formally reunified.
 
The Korean peninsula has been divided since the end of World War II left the formerly Japanese-occupied country split at the 38th parallel between zones occupied by the Soviet Union and the United States.
 
War broke out in 1950 when the communist North invaded its neighbor. The conflict, which saw intervention by China backing the North and U.S.-led U.N. forces supporting the South, ended with an armistice in 1953.


North Korean leader Kim Jong-il (AP Photo)
Largely eclipsed by the Kim Jong-il regime’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability, the oppression suffered by ordinary North Koreans draws relatively little international attention.
 
The organizers of the weekend events in South Korea note that an estimated four million North Koreans – of a total of some 22 million – have died since 1995 as a result of starvation resulting directly or indirectly from government policies, despite the provision of enough food aid by the international community to feed to entire population.
 
A further one million people are believed to have died since the 1970s in Pyongyang’s notorious prison camp system, where abuses reported by surviving inmates include systematic torture, rape, medical experimentation, and forced abortions and infanticide.
 
Fleeing oppression and starvation, an estimated half a million North Koreans have in recent years crossed into neighboring China, from where some have managed to make their way to third countries, usually ending up eventually in South Korea.
 
As illegals in China, many are vulnerable to sex slavery and trafficking, while facing the risk that Beijing – which refuses to recognize them as refugees under international convention – will forcibly repatriate them. Human rights campaigners say those sent back to North Korea face imprisonment, torture or even death.


A malnourished North Korean boy eating food supplied by the U.N. World Food Program at a hospital in South Pyongan province in February 2004. Rights activists say some four million North Koreans have died of starvation since 1995. (WFP Photo by Gerald Bourke)
“We demand the liberation and rebuilding of North Korea based upon the foundation of ensuring and guaranteeing without fail the human rights and safety of every North Korean individual according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international law,” the UnifyKorea2009 organizers said in a statement.
 
“We, the international community, have all failed to keep our promise and uphold international law, and most miserably in the case of North Korea.”
 
‘The best socialist state in the world’
 
Conditions in North Korea face unusually close scrutiny at the U.N. Human Rights Council next month, when it goes through a “universal periodic review” (UPR), a mechanism designed to examine one-by-one the rights records of all 192 U.N. member states.
 
The UPR aims to look at a country’s institutional framework for promoting and protecting human rights and to identify “achievements, best practices, challenges and constraints.”
 
Each review is based on three reports, provided ahead of time by the government, U.N. rights experts and NGOs. A three-hour “dialogue” then takes place between representatives of the government and the members of the Human Rights Council. North Korea’s UPR is scheduled for December 7.
 
Pyongyang is sensitive to outside criticism, and state media outlets hit back this week, accusing the U.S. and Japanese governments in particular of using human rights as part of “a despicable plot” to apply political pressure against North Korea.
 
“Those countries that are becoming most vociferous about ‘human rights issues’ are the countries with the most serious human rights records without an exception,” the official KCNA news agency said in an article on Wednesday.
 
“To take the U.S. as an example, the rich get ever richer and the poor ever poorer and the number of the unemployed and the poor is on the steady increase; the right of equality, the right to work and the right to existence – elementary rights of human being – are being ruthlessly violated.”
 
By contrast, it said, North Korea was “the best socialist state in the world as it is centered on the popular masses.”
 
KCNA said North Koreans “enjoy a genuine life and happiness as human beings, something unimaginable in the capitalist society where a human being is treated as a slave of money.
 
“Under our socialism the popular masses, the driving force of the history, are considered as the most powerful and dignified beings and everybody enjoys a worthwhile and joyful life, working hard for the prosperity of the country.”
 
Separately, the North’s Rodong Sinmun mouthpiece published a commentary Wednesday responding to U.S. criticism of religious freedom violations.
 
Accusing the U.S. of behaving like “a religious judge,” the paper said “religionists” in North Korea were “leading a free pious life, exercising inviolable rights as citizens free from any discrimination.”
 
It said the U.S. was raising the issue not out of “any sincere interest in the pious life of the religionists” but to tarnish North Korea’s image.
 
In its most recent annual report on international religious freedom, released last week, the State Department named North Korea as one of eight “countries of particular concern” (CPCs) for egregious violations. The U.S. has designated North Korea as a CPC under the International Religious Freedom Act every year since 2001.
 
The advocacy group Open Doors has ranked North Korea as the world’s worst persecutor of Christians for the past seven consecutive years.