Seoul, South Korea - After spending 18 months illegally in China in the mid-1980's and converting to Christianity, Kim Tae Jin was locked up for four years in North Korea's infamous prison camp No. 15 at Yodok.
Kim Tae Jin, right, is a co-chairman of NK Gulag, a human rights organization in Seoul.
He fled North Korea a few years after his release and in 2001 found his way to South Korea, where he is a co-chairman of NK Gulag, a private group focusing on human rights in North Korea. For Mr. Kim, while securing those rights is an important goal, it comes second to a far more consequential one: evangelizing in North Korea.
"God never ordered us to fight for human rights, but he ordered us to spread the word to the end of the earth," Mr. Kim, 50, said, adding that the group's leaders were North Korean converts to Christianity. Their faith, he said, buttressed their political work. "Because we are North Koreans and Christians, we feel responsible for leading the fight for better conditions in North Korea."
In South Korea, the issue of human rights in the North has been spearheaded by conservative Christians whose aim is to take their faith to the northern half of the divided peninsula. Although the movement's most visible spokesmen are North Korean defectors, its core is made up of South Korean Christians who in the past decade have grown into the world's second-largest overseas missionary force after the United States'.
The Korean Christians, along with evangelical American Christians, have formed a sometimes uneasy alliance with conservative American politicians. All share a distaste for negotiating with North Korea over any issue, from human rights to nuclear arms, and a desire for a change of government in the North. They fiercely criticize the South Korean government's engagement of North Korea, which they say has led to an immoral silence over abuses in the North.
Few here would argue with the assessment of organizations like Human Rights Watch that the North Korean government is "among the world's most repressive," engaging in arbitrary arrests and the pervasive use of torture. North Korea is a place, Human Rights Watch points out, with no fair trials, no political opposition, no independent civil society and no freedom of information or religion.
But the North Korean human rights issue has become so politicized that the actual plight of North Koreans is often emphasized or de-emphasized for other ends.
"Right now, both Koreans and Americans have ulterior motives in focusing on North Korean human rights," said the Rev. Benjamin H. Yoon, who ran Amnesty International's South Korea office for many years before founding the Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights in 1996. It is the oldest private group concerned with abuses in the North.
Mr. Yoon's group is critical of the Christian groups for linking human rights with evangelizing and the South Korean government for failing to speak out on the subject.
The South Korean government contends that it is putting a priority on peace on the Korean peninsula by refraining from spotlighting human rights violations by the North Korean government, which regards such criticism as a threat to its hold on power. South Korea says it is promoting human rights in the North by increasing economic ties and nudging it toward more openness.
To South Korea, harsh talk on human rights is a cover for hard-liners here and in the Bush administration to scuttle six-nation talks over the nuclear crisis. Just as the Bush administration's recent focus on the North's counterfeiting after more than a decade of silence has outraged the North Koreans, the continuing focus on human rights has handed North Korea another excuse not to resume talks.
By contrast, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said recently that she planned to focus more attention on North Korean rights abuses. "We've talked about this issue with South Korea, which is not always an easy conversation," Ms. Rice told the House International Relations Committee.
The politicization of human rights is reflected in South Korea's recent history, Mr. Yoon said. During South Korea's military rule, proponents of democratization, including Roh Moo Hyun, now the president and a former human rights lawyer, fought for human rights and "were considered progressive and leftist," Mr. Yoon, 76, said.
"Now, because of the government's engagement policy toward the North, speaking out against human rights abuses in the North is regarded as reactionary and rightist," he said.
Until the start of its "sunshine policy" of engagement in the late 1990's, the South Korean government highlighted the North's human rights violations. The Korean Central Intelligence Agency debriefed North Korean defectors and urged some to transform their statements into books.
One such account became "The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag," a memoir by Kang Chol Hwan, a defector who was invited to meet President Bush in the White House last year. Mr. Kang, who has said that intermediaries connected with the intelligence agency helped him publish his memoir after he arrived here in 1992, is a co-chairman of NK Gulag, which is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy.
Against this political backdrop, it is an open secret that some North Korean defectors, and their backers, exaggerate their experiences in North Korea.
"They exaggerate their stories for money and fame," said the Rev. Joseph Park, the Christian Council of Korea's mission director. "They say that they were political prisoners when they were ordinary prisoners, or that they saw something they only heard about."
Critics also say that some Christians, while professing their commitment to human rights in the North, are actually endangering the lives of North Koreans through their evangelizing.
The Rev. Kim Tae Hyun, an official with the National Council of Churches in Korea, which supports the South Korean government's low-key approach on human rights in North Korea, criticizes missionaries who send North Koreans living in China back into the North to proselytize secretly. "They are putting the defectors at great risk," Mr. Kim said.
Durihana, a South Korean missionary group that is also increasing its lobbying in the United States, engages in the practice.
"We don't force them to go back," said Chun Ki Won, 50, Durihana's director. "We send only volunteers."
Mr. Chun did not deny that he and others might have other goals in emphasizing human rights in the North.
"The U.S. may be using human rights to have leverage in the nuclear negotiations," he said. "But whether it's political or not, there is the reality that there are executions and human rights violations in North Korea, and we can't forget that."