An American Christian activist Robert Park , having been detained in North Korea since the last Christmas, has been released and arrived in Beijing today. He will later be taken to the U.S. embassy.
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… according to comments attributed to Robert Park by Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, the North Koreans have convinced him that he was wrong in his view of the North, whose “concentration camps,” Mr. Park said in an earlier interview with Reuters, were “of the same brutality as in Nazi Germany.”In the same report in which the KCNA dispatch announced that Park would be freed, he was quoted as saying that “people have been incredibly kind and generous here to me, very concerned for my physical health as never before in my life.” He was, he was quoted as saying, “very thankful for their love.”
[Christian Science Monitor]
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KCNA said Park had confessed to illegally entering the state and that he had changed his mind about North Korea after receiving kind treatment there.
“What I have seen and heard in the DPRK convinced me that I misunderstood it. So I seriously repented of the wrong I committed, taken in by the West’s false propaganda,” KCNA quoted Park as saying.
[Reuters]s
Some may find this response from Park as somewhat unexpected, but the quotes that the North Korean agency claims to be Park’s are no way to be trusted as accurate until he reveals his experiences and the decision through his own sincere voice.
So what did Park accomplish? It may be not as intangible as it seems. Perhaps, thanks to his decision to make a life-risking entry into North Korea, the manifest human rights abuses and the misgovernment of Kim Jong-Il regime could take another rare chance to come under the world’s spotlight once more without the loss of anyone’s life.
Some raise doubt as to the importance of raising worldwide attention on substantially improving the actual living conditions of North Koreans. But in the long run, the greater public and media awareness is indispensable to a more powerful and united voice from the international community that may be effective enough to induce any internal changes in North Korea.
Another video of Robert Park arriving in Beijing: http://www.ytn.co.kr/_comm/pop_mov.php?s_mcd=0104&s_hcd=&key=201002061515416650
No matter what the truth be, it is fortunate that he came back home safe.
I’m glad he will be released – and I bet he will change his statements the moment he is back in US soil. From what can be seen, he doesn’t look physicially tortured or damaged. But it seems obvious that his mind broken.
How many prisoners records can you retrieve for free or must you always pay? Is there a source for a new PI?
North Koreans have been known to brainwash people through repetition, starvation, torture, etc. Robert Park has spent a year’s worth of influence in North Korea, and I find it hard to believe he was speaking his own mind.
Derrick// Most of the prisoner records come from many different testimonies of defectors who were former political prisoners. The N.G.O. that I was working called NKDB, for example, does exactly that; it collects testimonies from the defectors residing in South Korea.