[THE INVESTOR] On April 29, 1992, South Korea’s top intelligence agency arrested dozens of activists for plotting to overthrow the government by building underground socialist organizations. The authorities described the groups as the biggest antistate entity ever established in the country’s modern history.

One of those arrested was Baik Tae-ung, who served as leader of the South Korean Socialist Coalition of Workers or “Sanomaeng” in Korean. Despite the plea that he was exercising the right to political freedom, the then 29-year-old activist was sentenced to life in prison, a sentence which was later reduced to 15 years.

Baik was designated as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and released in 1999 through a special pardon from former President Kim Dae-jung. He flew to the United States, where he earned a doctoral degree on international human rights law and passed the bar exam in the State of New York. 

Now the activist-turned-professor has returned to South Korea with a new mission – to bring home people abducted by North Korea.

In 2015, his related activities won him the membership of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, representing Asia-Pacific states.

“The South Korean government should come forward to address this issue as it has significant meaning in the nation’s modern history. It is not just a matter of bringing an individual back home. It is about healing wounds from the past,” Baik said in an interview with The Korea Herald.

“From the moment of kidnapping, individuals are deprived of the right to protect themselves and exposed to various types of torture. Forced disappearance is a grave violation of human rights, causing pain not just to those who have disappeared, but also to their family members.”

The professor was in Seoul in June to attend a parliamentary seminar that discussed measures to retrieve those abducted by North Korea. According to a report by the Ministry of Unification, 4,782 South Korean nationals were kidnapped during the Korean War and 516 were alive in the North as of 2013.

Some of them were reportedly subject to physical abuse while their family members faced a similar fate here after being accused of sympathizing with communism. Until now, North Korea has refused to confirm the whereabouts of the abductees and dismissed the South Korean government’s reclamation of them as a “malicious and false” plot to undermine its regime.

The U.N. human rights adviser noted that his agency would allow these victimized families to directly access not only the multinational organization, but also their own government.

“The organization fosters communication between the victims and the state because we constantly monitor the case until it is solved. We allow the state to get more involved with the issue when the victims find it difficult to do so,” he said.

“What we do is more about coming up with a comprehensive strategy than physically going out there to find the people. We are working as a sort of independent expert and offer our own professional insight. Actually, my job is not limited to North Korean issues but involves 86 states worldwide.”

The key function of Baik’s agency is to gather disappearance cases, connect victims to their respective government, file related reports, help the government carry out investigation and follow up on cases on a periodic basis, he explained.

Underlining the role that the U.N. organization has played in dealing with forced disappearance across the world, Paik referred to a case of 65,000 people reported missing in Sri Lanka during its 26-year civil war.

The agency got the Sri Lankan government to sign the U.N. Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, under which the states must enact specific laws to prevent such disappearances, investigate reports of related cases and bring those responsible to justice.

Some skeptics doubt the same thing can happen in North Korea. The reclusive regime recently refused to address the disappearances. The U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Human Right reported that the regime was responsible for the disappearances of more than 20,000 people.

The human rights expert, however, suggested that there are possibilities that the reclusive regime may open up further toward international organizations, hoping to advocate their stance in the global society.

“North Korea, which used to show zero reaction to our requests, is now addressing the given accusations in international platforms. Although it is still refusing to reveal the whereabouts and identification of the abductees, I believe that the scope of engagement has changed,” he said

“What we need to do is to steer such change in the right direction.”

To induce changes in Pyongyang, Paik asserted that the hawkish approaches taken by the current Park Geun-hye administration and its conservative predecessor toward the North needs to change.

Conservative political camps have often been cited North Korea’s human rights problem as part of their attack against Pyongyang’s nuclear provocations. Progressive parties, in contrast, tend to be reluctant to raise the given issue, in fear of harming the tense inter-Korean relations.

As a solution to such partisan divide, Paik suggested that the South Korean government take a two-track approach -- responding sternly to military threats while engaging in further efforts to improve human rights.

“It is precarious to cross out all talks because of the nuclear issue. We need to address the human rights agenda, alongside the negotiations for denuclearization,” he said.

The Korean government tends to either exaggerate the seriousness of the situation to raise tension or to shun the issue altogether lest it damage bilateral ties, he added.

“Neither solution is good, as the human rights problem is a universal agenda that reaches beyond politics.”

His criticism also extends to the U.S., including its recent decision to slap sanctions on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and 10 other regime officials for their alleged complicity in human rights abuse against its own people.

It as the first time Washington blacklisted the young leader personally. State Department spokesperson John Kirby said the report represents “the most comprehensive U.S. government effort to date” to name those linked with the communist state’s oppression of its people.

Baik, however, played down the consequent impact of the sanction, asserting that it lacked “comprehensive vision” to address the human rights issue and was mostly driven by domestic pressure to take an assertive stance in Asia-Pacific against China.

”The sanction, which came as counteraction to the North’s nuclear development, was more of a security measure than a step to improve the regime’s human rights reality,” he said.

“That is why we should not impart too much meaning to the decision.”

The decision also reflected U.S. domestic politics, in which both Democrats and Republicans view China as a security threat and try to use Pyongyang to mount pressure on Beijing, according to the professor.

Back when South Korea was under authoritarian rule, democratic campaigners largely refrained from publicly denouncing North Korea, in fear of backlash against the government’s frequent use of anticommunist sentiments to justify their crackdown on activists.

Paik was a unique figure in the left-leaning group. In an article by him published in 1992, titled “Our Stance toward Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and its Workers Party,” he said that the DPRK’s personality cult and massive propaganda would eventually undermine the system.

Now the 53-year-old scholar hopes that liberal-minded people will take a more assertive tone against North Korea’s dismal human rights problems.

“With the authoritarian era way back in the past, South Korea has now become a liberal society capable of playing a more important role in alleviating the pain of North Korea’s residents,” he said.

“As for my part, I feel proud for what I have done to make Korea a better place, for being part of the nation’s democratic progress.”

He pledged to play a bridging role between his native country and the international body to which he currently belongs, so as to improve the peninsula’s political and social disposition.

“Sometimes it is a shame that I can’t be physically with those people spending everyday working so hard,” he said, promising to make more frequent visits here in the future.

”I hope that my work at the U.N. will help the Koreas improve.”

By Yeo Jun-suk (jasonyeo@heraldcorp.com)