North Korea Human Rights Advocate

It has been just reported that Robert Park, a 28-year-old Korean-American Christian missionary, crossed the frozen Tumen River into North Korea from China on Christmas Day to urge Kim to release political prisoners and shut down the concentration camps where they are held. He went into the  town of Hoeryong, which is highly infamous for being both the birthplace of Kim Jong Il’s mother and the town nearest to Camp 22.

Park told to Reuters in Seoul earlier this week that he saw it as his duty as a Christian to make the journey and did not want the U.S. government to try to free him.

“I don’t want President Obama to come and pay to get me out. But I want the North Korean people to be free,” Park said on Wednesday before departing for China.

“Until the concentration camps are liberated, I do not want to come out. If I have to die with them, I will. (For) these innocent men, women and children, as Christians, we need to take the cross for them. The cross means that we sacrifice our lives for the redemption of others,” he said.    [Reuters, Jon Herskovitz]

It is certainly a reminder of the detainment of the two US journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling in March. Park’s bold action to willingly confront a grave risk seems to have come not from political, but genuinely out of his personal religious passion for North Koreans’ freedom.

But I doubt, regretfully, that even his sacrifice like this would make Kim Jong-Il  repent and experience a religious conversion. It is my only wish that Park’s courage and vision for freedom in North Korea, the part of which I also share, will be able to catch greater attention from the international community to slowly inspire Kim Jong-Il to repent and experience a diplomatic conversion.