US officials and international activists will discuss North Korea's human-rights abuses at a three-day conference in Seoul this week that is likely to embarrass the South Korean government.
US Ambassador to South Korea Alexander Vershbow and the White House special envoy on North Korean human rights, Jay Lefkowitz, will attend, organizers said.
Invitations to officials from President Roh Moo-hyun's government to participate in the conference have been politely turned down, however.
PHOTO:AP
Seoul says it is concerned about human rights in North Korea but believes that highlighting the politically sensitive issue will hurt its long-term goal of peace and reconciliation with Pyongyang.
Since South Korea launched a charm offensive advocating cooperation with North Korea in 2000, the government is reluctant to show Pyongyang in a negative light.
South Koreans are rarely exposed to criticism of the North Korean regime. Partly as a result, polls show that most young South Koreans with no memory of the Korean War see their neighbor as a poor and backward state that would never use its massive army or the nuclear weapons it claims to possess against them.
Roh has defended Seoul's position in the past and suggested in a speech on Tuesday that the issue should be handled as part of a comprehensive drive to resolve wider problems relating to North Korea.
"We should take a strategic approach on North Korea's human rights problem, handling it in a comprehensive and broad manner," Roh told advisors.
For its part North Korea rejects charges of human-rights abuses and accuses the US and its allies of using human rights as a political tool in a campaign to overthrow the government in Pyongyang.
Some activists in South Korea also suspect that human rights are being politicized by US hawks seeking the overthrow of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.
"We cannot accept the official motive of the Seoul conference, which comes amid a drive by hawks in the United States to highlight North Korea's human rights record," said Cheong Wook-sik, who leads an influential group promoting reconciliation with the North.
"Talking about North Korea's human rights requires serious deliberation on its impact on inter-Korean reconciliation and six-party talks," he said.
The two Koreas are engaged in bumpy six-way talks with the US, China, Japan and Russia on how to end the North Korean nuclear standoff.
North Korea stands accused by human rights groups of operating a vast network of camps for political prisoners, employing forced labor and torture, carrying out public executions and trampling on religious and other freedoms.
Lee In-ho, a professor at Myongji University in Seoul, is a co-chairman of the conference that runs from today until Saturday and will draw more than 500 participants, according to the organizers, who include Freedom House, the US democracy and freedom advocacy group that hosted a similar conference on North Korea in Washington in July.
She said the conference will avoid politicizing the human-rights agenda in North Korea and that South Koreans have been afraid to join the international outcry against the North's rights abuses for too long.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS