[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Pages 6670-6672]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




 NOMINATION OF KATHLEEN STEPHENS AS U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE REPUBLIC OF 
                              SOUTH KOREA

  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader for 
recognizing me and allowing me to speak this evening before we close 
down.
  I want to put before the body a situation that is happening right now 
in North Korea. I put a hold on our nominee to be the Ambassador to the 
Republic of South Korea. I want to explain why I am doing that. I want 
to show why I am doing that. Then I want to raise some issues on human 
rights and why we need to be a lot more involved and pushy about what 
is taking place in North Korea.
  I was encouraged last week in a meeting I had with the new President 
of South Korea, Mr. Lee Myung Bak, at a meeting hosted by the Senate 
leadership. I was encouraged to hear his interest in dealing with the 
human rights situation--or lack thereof, of human rights--in North 
Korea. He is going to be more willing to work with us than the last 
Korean administration in South Korea.
  I was pleased to see his willingness to work with us and support us 
on the nuclear negotiations in which the Korean Peninsula would be a 
nuclear-free zone--although that is not the case. We have seen what 
North Korea has done in their willingness to proliferate. I told the 
President of South Korea--and he agreed--we must see real and verified 
results with the North Korean regime, not only on nuclear activities 
but also on the issue of human rights.
  We are not seeing either. We are not seeing real and verifiable 
results on what they are doing in the nuclear development category. We 
are certainly not seeing it in the human rights category.
  Without transparent improvement in human rights, and I believe the 
same on the nuclear issues as well, I told him the establishment of 
diplomatic relations would condone crimes against humanity on a massive 
scale. Without transparent distribution of humanitarian aid from the 
United States and outside world into North Korea, this aid would be 
used as a weapon of oppression and diverted from those in greatest need 
to those elites who get the most under the system.
  These statements I made to him were well received, which is a change 
from the prior administration which sought a different policy toward 
North Korea, one they wanted to engage but certainly not address on 
these human rights and nuclear issues.
  I met with our nominee to be the Ambassador to South Korea. I met 
with her twice. In two meetings with Ms. Stephens, the nominee, I gave 
her every opportunity to explain to me why she should be our next 
Ambassador to the Republic of South Korea and how she would address the 
human rights issues. She is certainly a qualified individual, spending 
her adult career in the State Department and international work. She is 
a highly qualified individual. Yet on how we are going to and if we are 
going to positively address the human rights concern and address it on 
a high scale--to where it is one of the top issues we are dealing with, 
not just one that, well, once we deal with these others we will talk 
about human rights or we might bring it up--I did not get satisfactory 
answers from her, nor did I get those even from Secretary Rice, for 
whom I have great admiration, a week later, after my meetings with the 
nominee.
  I asked her in the Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations hearing 
what specific ``asks'' we are making of North Korea on the human rights 
agenda. She didn't say that we had particular items. Now maybe there 
are ones she is willing to identify. One I asked her specifically about 
is why don't we ask the North Koreans to shut down the gulags, the 
political prisoner camps which I am going to showcase here. Why don't 
we ask them to shut those down as an ``ask,'' putting those on the 
table? I didn't get a response.
  We are now approaching 4 years since the passage of the North Korean 
Human Rights Act of 2004. I was willing to give the State Department 
and other agencies time to implement the act. I was willing to give 
those implementing the law, which included Ms. Stephens, our nominee to 
be the Ambassador to South Korea, the benefit of the doubt. I was 
willing to wait to see if the Department of State negotiators would be 
willing to confront the North Koreans regarding their human rights 
abuses. I wanted to see how much priority they would give to addressing 
the trafficking along the border between North Korea and China.
  Today I met with a number of refugees from North Korea. If a woman 
crosses over that border looking for food in China, 100 percent are 
trafficked--they are caught and sold. That is taking place on that 
border today. I wanted to see if we would give priority to the 
trafficking issues or gain accession to the gulags that dot the country 
or ensure the food aid would be strictly monitored. I am still waiting, 
as are many other individuals and groups working on North Korean 
issues, but my wait is not significant, nor is their wait. The 23 
million North Koreans who are waiting are the ones who are dying. Many 
are desperately waiting in the gulags. I would like to show you these 
pictures today.
  These pictures are from Google Earth. Google has made a witness of 
all of us, to no longer deny that these things exist and say they are 
classified photographs. You can go on Google Earth and look these up. 
The existence of these camps and the specific details have been 
confirmed by North Korean defectors living in South Korea.
  Some are guards, others former prisoners in some camps that they were 
able to get out of. I would like to thank, in particular, Rev. Chun Ki 
Won for his assistance.
  We now have no excuse for ignoring the truth of what many believe is 
a holocaust that is occurring in North Korea today. The U.S. Committee 
for Human Rights in North Korea believes that 400,000 have already died 
in these camps alone--400,000 have died in these camps alone according 
to the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
  If you listen to the defectors' stories, as I have done on several 
occasions, the scale and depravity of the crimes that are committed in 
these camps rival those done by Pol Pot in Cambodia and even by the 
Nazis.
  Too many of us refuse to confront this issue. Maybe we are afraid 
that confronting the atrocities of these camps would also require us to 
confront its urgent moral imperatives.
  The first photo here is of Camp 22 where chemical experiments are 
alleged to have occurred. Camp 22 is in this picture. It is a huge 
concentration camp. It is over 400 square miles in size, a 
concentration camp.
  No known prisoner has ever left the camp. The information we have has 
been from guards who have defected. No prisoner has been known to get 
out of this camp alive. The guards we contacted were able to identify 
its electric fences and moats. They were able to point out the huts 
where its prisoners live, the coal mines where men are worked to death, 
and the forests and fields where the dead are not buried, they are 
discarded.
  Former guard Kwon Hyuk claims the fences around Camp 22 are about 2.5 
meters high and electrified with 3,300 volts of electricity. He also 
says the camp is surrounded by land mines and spiked moats.
  If you look carefully at the center of this next picture, of the 
courtyard at the middle of the guard station, you will see what appears 
to be a group of people coming in. This is the entry gate--a group of 
people going in to whatever fate we do not know.
  Outside the gates, life for North Koreans, such as it is, goes on. 
This year is said to be an especially difficult one in this part of 
North Korea, but the

[[Page 6671]]

farmers outside the gate are still luckier than those inside.
  Farmers cannot pretend not to know what goes on beyond the fence. One 
recent defector who lived just outside Camp 22 told his American 
English teacher how the guards from his camp would come to his house 
and search for scarce food and alcohol, and how drunken guards would 
confess remorsefully to the cruelties they inflicted on the prisoners.
  The teacher published his recollection in the Washington Post last 
year, which I ask unanimous consent be made part of the Record and 
printed at the end of my statement.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 1).
  Mr. BROWNBACK. This next picture is the Chungbong Coal Mine in Camp 
22. I described Camp 22. It is over 400 square miles. Its main features 
are coal and forest mining. Ahn Myong Chol, a former guard and driver 
at Camp 22, described the working conditions in this mine. Prisoners 
work two shifts a day on meager rations. They are organized into five-
person teams and are encouraged to earn rewards and supplement the 
starvation rations by informing on each other. Prisoners are beaten 
frequently, sometimes to death, and often for no reason at all. This is 
according to a former guard in Camp 22.
  They work in cramped, narrow shafts. Accidents and cave-ins kill many 
prisoners. Those who are injured are sent to a hospital without 
qualified staff or medical supplies, and they are essentially left to 
die. Others die of exhaustion as they try to meet daily quotas. Those 
who fail to meet the quotas are not fed.
  Now, there are dozens of these camps all over North Korea. I want to 
show you some locations of the various gulags that are known throughout 
North Korea. We now have corroborated reports from multiple sources of 
the kind of depravity that continues in these camps to this day.
  Why not, in our Six Party negotiations and talks that we have going 
on today, that one of our primary ``asks,'' along with dealing with the 
nuclear issue, be to shut the gulag system down? It is a very clear, a 
very specific ``ask.'' We have evidence from Google Earth. I believe we 
have much better satellite photographs that go into this in even more 
detail.
  There are hundreds of North Koreans who have fled now into South 
Korea, a few into this country, with evidence, who are speaking about 
this issue. So they know and can corroborate what we are seeing in the 
pictures.
  Why not confront the North Koreas with it on an equal par with the 
nuclear negotiations? I think to do this advances our cause overall.
  In the Soviet Union, when we were dealing with them on nuclear 
disarmament, one of the key things we asked for is, well, with the 
human rights agenda, put it up right there beside it. People are 
saying: Do not do that. You are going to upset the balance. But when 
you talk with the people who were in the prison system, and you hear 
their statements about it, they were saying that what gave them heart 
was they knew someone on the outside world was paying attention to 
them.
  It also delegitimized the Soviet Union because as long as you are 
going at the nuclear issue, the Government in North Korea says, ``They 
are just trying to disarm us.'' And ``They have got it, this is 
something that we as North Koreans deserve.''
  But when you say: What about the Chungbong Coal Mine and the people 
dying there every day; what about Camp 22 where you are having people 
going into this all of the time but nobody ever comes out; if you raise 
that, it delegitimizes the regime, it makes them confront their own 
people about what they are doing. And that is a more powerful tool. Why 
would we not raise that? This was my question to our nominee. Why are 
we not raising that?
  It seems as if the desire to get something on the nuclear side is so 
much greater than that on the human rights side, that this one is set: 
OK, when we get the nuclear one dealt with, we will deal with this. But 
in the meantime, people are dying, a lot of them. And this goes on. It 
continues at a time when we would look at those things and say: My 
goodness, this is 2008. This does not go on in the world today. You 
have pictures. You can go on Google Earth and see it.
  I think we have to raise this issue. I think it is important in our 
negotiations for us to raise this issue. We have expressed our horror 
at what has taken place in various places around the world and said, 
``never again.'' We have said it about concentration camps. Yet it is 
going on here and we have a negotiation and we are not even making it a 
major issue. So I believe we need to step up and we need to push this 
issue.
  The final point I would like to make about this is that the Chinese 
are complicit in this as well. They are the ones who could put the most 
pressure of any country in the world outside of Korea on the North 
Koreans. They are the ones who have the economic relations. They are 
the ones who are the protector of North Korea. When people escape out 
of one of these camps or try looking for food in China, they are caught 
by the Chinese and repatriated to an uncertain fate, likely death, 
often imprisonment, and they are sent back against the Chinese 
requirements of what they had signed in the U.N. Human Rights 
Commission Agreement in 1951, an agreement that China is a signatory of 
that says they will not send people back into a death camp situation or 
where their health would be challenged or would be likely harmed or 
that they would be killed.
  Clearly, that is taking place over there, and China continues to do 
it. So on top of what they are doing in Tibet and what they are doing 
in North Korea, on top of what they are doing in Sudan, enabling the 
Sudanese Government to continue this in Darfur and buying oil out of 
Sudan and backing reform in the United Nations, on top of that and 
pursuing resources out of the Congo, regardless of what sorts of abuses 
are taking place by the groups or the militias stealing the resources 
to take them out through China, regardless of what is taking place in 
Burma where the Chinese are blocking and supporting the Burmese and 
then they are pushing people out, the Korean people are being pushed 
into Thailand, but they are not citizens of Thailand so they are being 
trafficked from that point. The Chinese are the ones who are complicit 
in all of this. They are the great enabler of human rights abuses 
around the world today, in their own country and externally. They bear 
a huge responsibility for what is taking place today in North Korea.
  I hope this continues to be expressed and brought up--I plan to do 
so--prior to the Olympics this year, which should be a celebration of 
great athleticism. I believe it will be. But as China seeks to exploit 
this as a presentation of their coming forward in the world, I hope the 
world notices what else they are doing. They are hosting a grand 
Olympics, but they are hosting a greater catastrophe of human rights 
abuses in their country and around the world. Whether it is Tibetans or 
people in the house church movement, Falun Gong members being arrested, 
North Koreans, Burmese, Sudanese, Congolese, they lay at the doorstep 
of the Chinese.
  I think we need to confront this. I am hopeful the administration 
will address this. I know the President personally cares very deeply 
about human rights abuses in North Korea. He has met individually with 
people who have come out of North Korea. I talked directly with him 
about it. I don't think we are seeing the administration meet the 
President's greatest desires on addressing this issue. That is why I 
put a hold on Kathleen Stephens being Ambassador to the Republic of 
Korea until we begin to address these issues.
  I yield the floor.

                               Exhibit 1

                [From the Washington Post, Apr. 1, 2007]

            Escape From Dear Leader to My Classroom in Seoul

                        (By Samuel Songhoon Lee)

       Seoul.-- At a small restaurant in late February, my student 
     and I ate spicy noodle soup and stared at a huge TV showing 
     the extravagant celebration of Kim Jong Il's 65th birthday in 
     Pyongyang. Thousands of smiling people paraded across the 
     North Korean capital and saluted their Dear Leader.

[[Page 6672]]

       ``I was once there,'' my student said. ``But even as I 
     danced and smiled, I knew of a better life outside.'' She 
     said this matter-of-factly and turned to stir her tea. Her 
     search for that better life had brought her here, at age 13, 
     to Seoul, and to my English class at a special school for 
     young North Korean defectors.
       The school has more than two dozen students, members of a 
     growing contingent of North Koreans who have deserted that 
     communist country since famines in the mid-1990s killed more 
     than 2 million people. According to South Korea's Ministry of 
     Unification, 41 North Korean defectors arrived in South Korea 
     in 1995. The number increased to 312 in 2000, and to 1,383 in 
     2005, many of them young people.
       It isn't easy for these young defectors to fit into South 
     Korean schools and fill the gaps in their education. Most 
     schools here don't offer transition courses on the 
     differences in language and culture. But catching up with 
     schoolwork is only one problem they face.
       In South Korea, a country that withstood centuries of 
     invasions from its Chinese and Japanese neighbors, unity 
     defines survival. And without ethnic diversity or a history 
     of immigration, unity means conformity. When something 
     becomes fashionable here, it can have significant 
     consequences. For example, South Korea has the world's 
     highest ratio of cosmetic surgeons to citizens, catering to 
     the legions of girls who receive eyelid surgery as a present 
     for their 16th birthday. This culture of unity and conformity 
     is vastly different from the one I experienced growing up 
     Korean American in New York, Denver and Seattle. The lack of 
     diversity at school makes the young defectors instant 
     standouts--subject to 15 minutes of fame and adulation, then 
     an enduring period of isolation. When their peers ask about 
     their accent--noticeably different from what's common in 
     Seoul--most students say they're from Gangwon Province, in 
     the northeastern part of the country.
       Facing ostracism from South Korean students, many young 
     North Korean defectors drop out of school. According to a 
     ministry report in 2005, 43 percent of young defectors were 
     attending school, and 29 percent had dropped out of middle 
     and high schools. Almost half of the 198 young defectors 
     still attending school said that they hid their background 
     from classmates, according to a survey by the National Human 
     Rights Commission.
       ``Don't expect them to be like us just because they look 
     Korean and speak Korean,'' the principal told me on the 
     orientation day for volunteer teachers at School 34, an 
     independent school for defectors. ``Treat them like 
     foreigners, but with respect.''
       I was assigned to teach two English classes to students 
     ages 15 to 27. When I introduced myself, they were as puzzled 
     and curious about me as I was about them. An oversized Korean 
     American with big Sony headphones--was I really one of them?
       Taking the principal's advice, I made it clear from the 
     start that I was not, and that I probably could not 
     understand the obstacles they had to overcome to reach the 
     free world. Many feel deeply betrayed by Kim and the 
     propaganda they were forced to learn. But they have achieved 
     a surprising distance from their painful past. They share 
     memories--which include watching public executions and 
     boiling grass to eat in times of famine--as if they were 
     reciting folk tales with a sense of wonder and humor.
       Among my students, one young man stood out because of his 
     motivation to learn English. His family is still in North 
     Korea, and he wants to earn the $15,000 in payoffs it would 
     take to get them to Seoul. Numerous underground railroads 
     established by brokers in China make rescuing family members 
     from North Korea possible, he told me--if one has the money. 
     ``I can work hard for two years and make that money. But I 
     will lag behind in my study. Then what can I do even if my 
     family were to come here?'' he said.
       In North Korea, he knew exactly what he wanted to do: 
     become an officer in the North Korean army. He dreamed of 
     killing as many Americans and South Koreans as he could. In 
     his childhood home, a framed photo of his grandfather and Kim 
     was prominently displayed on the living room wall. His family 
     was part of North Korea's small and reclusive elite society, 
     and he would have marched off as an army lieutenant if he 
     hadn't received a black-market Sony Walkman for his 15th 
     birthday and listened to forbidden South Korean radio 
     frequencies.
       Late at night, muffling the scratchy signal so as not to 
     get caught, he tuned in to the news, learning that much of 
     what he was taught all day in school was a lie. ``We learned 
     that the Americans were constantly trying to invade us. But 
     from the South Korean news, I learned that it was the other 
     way around. But my classmates truly believed in what we were 
     learning. They were like robots.''
       When he graduated from high school and was ordered to serve 
     13 years in the military, he decided to defect. His father 
     bribed the North Korean border patrolmen, who took him to 
     China. Because the Chinese government regularly repatriated 
     North Korean refugees, South Korean missionaries took him to 
     Myanmar, where Seoul's consulate prepared the papers for his 
     final journey to South Korea.
       Soon after arriving in Seoul, he found School 34 and a 
     community of others like him. Most students were too poor to 
     have bribed their way out. Instead, they had braved often 
     frigid waters to swim across the Tumen River to China.
       Another student, a good-humored young woman, lost her 
     parents to starvation before she turned 11. To survive, she 
     said, she crossed the Tumen many times to obtain food and 
     other goods in China that she could sell on North Korea's 
     widespread black market. When she defected, she went as far 
     as Xinyang, in China's southeastern Henan Province. 
     Discovered by Chinese agents, she was repatriated and served 
     six months in prison. She was 13 at the time. After being 
     released, she swam across the river again and this time she 
     stayed in China, begging for food. Eventually, missionaries 
     helped her get to Seoul.
       One recent School 34 graduate is now studying at 
     Sungkyunkwan University, one of the nation's top colleges. He 
     grew up a few minutes away from one of North Korea's most 
     notorious political prisons, Prison 22 in Hyeryung, Ham-Kyung 
     Province, at the northern tip of North Korea. Because food 
     and alcohol are scarce in the countryside, the prison guards 
     went to his house for libations. ``They always drank 
     heavily,'' he told me. ``And when they got drunk, they would 
     mumble about how sorry they felt for what they did to 
     prisoners.''
       Despite his rare glimpse of the prison guards and knowledge 
     of what they did, my student says he finds it difficult to 
     raise awareness about the little-known gulags of North Korea 
     among his classmates in Seoul. Most do not care, he says. Or 
     worse, they take a pro-North Korea stance. President Roh Moo 
     Hyun has been passionately calling for the ouster of the 
     37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea, and a wave of anti-
     American sentiment is sweeping across college campuses. After 
     eight years of the dubious ``sunshine policy,'' which 
     advocated engagement with rather than containment of the 
     communist north, South Korean public sentiment favors 
     neglecting thousands of North Korean refugees in China and 
     pouring cash and aid into Pyongyang, even with Kim's apparent 
     nuclear ambitions.
       ``Back in North Korea, we learned to hate and fear 
     America,'' a 17-year-old student who attended middle school 
     in North Korea told me one recent afternoon over sodas at 
     McDonald's. His father was once responsible for importing and 
     distributing Soviet arms to the North Korean army. But he 
     defected to South Korea two years ago after his father was 
     purged. ``Now, I've realized that all I learned was a series 
     of lies,'' he said, taking a bite of his Big Mac. ``I wish my 
     friends back in North Korea could eat this one day.''
       We left McDonald's shortly and went back to School 34 to 
     study English.

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