END IT, DON'T MEND IT

A Defector's Story: My escape from North Korea--and South Korea. (Bok Ku Lee, June 5, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

Bok Ku Lee is not my real name, but one I've adopted to protect my family.

For a number of years I served as head of the technical department at a munitions complex that made missile guidance systems and related electronic devices for North Korea's military. I was one of 100,000 or so scientific and professional people involved in the regime's weapons of mass destruction industry.

While I made enough money to modestly feed my family, I witnessed mass starvation and oppression of those less fortunate, and unspeakable abuses of power and lifestyle excesses by senior political officials of the regime. As did everyone, I lived in constant fear of being sent to the gulag for the slightest indiscretion.

Nonetheless, I was trusted with some of the regime's biggest secrets. While serving, I was sent to Iran to test launch one of our missiles with a new guidance system for the then-ruling Ayatollah Khomeini. I consulted with colleagues who were sent to serve on an operational war basis for Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War, and others who were sent to other countries to sell, service and install such missile systems. I ordered, supervised and monitored the
foreign purchases of electronic and guidance material--90% of which came from Japanese suppliers. I worked with some of the 60 or so Russian scientists who had been "cherry picked" by the regime to work in Pyongyang's nuclear, atomic, chemical and biological warfare programs--and who continue to work there.

Yet, like most of my fellow countrymen, I longed for the day when I could escape the Stalinist prison my country had become. [...]

The time has come for South Korea and the U.S. to encourage the defection of thousands like me who are prepared to tell the world what they know and whose departure will deprive the regime of skills it needs to survive. Such mass defections will occur if the defectors are given a reasonable prospect for safe harbor outside of North Korea. At the same time, Seoul should end its barbarous "sunshine policy," which sentences fellow Koreans to slavery because giving
them freedom would cost too much money.

In short, the time has come to recognize that a policy of promoting democracy, insisting and ensuring that humanitarian aid actually go to the hungry rather than the regime, and encouraging mass defections, will cause the repeat in North Korea of what happened when East Germans defected to Austria through Hungary, thereby triggering the implosion of the Soviet Union without a shot being fired. This is a real and likely prospect for the oppressed people of my country and for world security.

Why not just impose regime change? Posted by Orrin Judd at June 5, 2003 1:02 PM