Helping High-ranking North Korean Officials Flee from the Country

Projects to support high-ranking North Korean officials` attempts to flee from the country thereby inducing the collapse of the Kim Jong-il regime are in the works among American religious and human rights groups.

Michael Horowitz, director of the Hudson Institute`s Project on Civil Justice Reform and the Project on International Religious Liberty, and some 50 Christian and human rights groups held a meeting in Washington D.C., on May 30. At the meeting, participants created a coalition whose aim is to present the Safe Harbor bill to the U.S. Congress.

“The coalition is expected to have clout with George W. Bush, who is known to be a faithful Christian. The Safe Harbor bill includes plans to promote the exile of high-ranking North Korean officials,” Mr. Horowitz and the Rev. Douglas Shin, who is initiating Korean Peninsula Peace Project (aka Exodus 21), said in a telephone interview with this paper.

The bill is also reported to have plans to give North Korean defectors the same status as Cuban exiles and to increase transmission time to North Korea from the current 4 hours to 24 for Radio Free Asia.

In the interview, Mr. Horowitz confirmed that the Safe Harbor project will proceed as planned.

Horowitz said: “A lot of North Korean officials and scholars have contacted me in various ways to find out the possibility for exile. If the U.S. government promises to look after North Korean defectors through a single channel, at least 10,000 high-ranking North Koreans are predicted to exile themselves.”

Jung-Ahn Kim credo@donga.com