HRF Threatened by Kim Dictatorship: “We Will Take Practical Measures to Physically Eliminate This Human Scum”

SEOUL (June 27, 2013)— The North Korean government has declared their intention to kill a delegation from the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) this Saturday during a South Korea-based balloon launch aimed at distributing information and equipment into North Korea. HRF, in cooperation with the civil society organization Fighters for Free North Korea, intends to travel to the border with North Korea and launch 5,000 helium balloons each containing a small package that includes USB drives, a transistor radio, chocolates, CDs and leaflets denouncing the North Korean dictatorship and offering an alternative view of life beyond the border. “The Kim dictatorship perfectly illustrates their inhumanity and weakness by reacting to a non-violent educational effort aimed at breaking the monopoly of information over their people by threatening retaliation with deadly force. We plan to send accurate information and in return they menace with ‘slitting our throats,’” said HRF president Thor Halvorssen who is in Seoul accompanying Park Sang Hak, a defector from North Korea whose organization has spent the last ten years providing his people with opinions that differ from the regime’s official propaganda machinery. HRF awarded Park the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent last month in Oslo, Norway for his work informing underground networks inside North Korea. In 2011, the North Korean government sent an assassin into South Korea armed with poison-tipped needles to kill Park. The agent was caught and imprisoned before he could carry out his mission. The North Korean regime labels Park “Enemy Zero” of the regime. The “warning message” from the government, available in Korean and English here, claims that Park’s leaflets “distort the wonderful reality of the Republic” and states that the “People’s Security Ministry [will] take practical measures to physically eliminate human scum”: “Our military would never miss the chance to annihilate and firmly punish such arch traitors....” The warning for “brothers from the Human Rights Foundation” is to “go back home as soon as possible” or die with the defectors “already sentenced to death.” The threat is consistent with years of rhetoric that characterizes the Pyongyang regime. “There is a huge demand for outside information in North Korea and it is not, at present, being met,” said Park Sang Hak. “Most people inside North Korea have no access to the internet or differing views, so we have decided to use the sky as our pathway.” HRF has previously sponsored exposure of the North Korean regime through its Oslo Freedom Forum program with talks by Kang Chol Hwan, Hannah Song, Barbara Demick, and Park Sang Hak. Contact: Jamie Hancock - Human Rights Foundation, (212) 246.8486, jamie@thehrf.org