Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

WASHINGTON — Robert Park cried out in torment as he spoke on the phone from Seoul about what he had endured — not at the hands of the North Koreans who held him for 43 days after he crossed the frozen Tumen River into North Korea on Christmas Day, 2009, but about a South Korean report claiming to quote him on what he had endured.

The article carried by Yonhap, the South Korean news agency, purporting to quote his remarks about the sexual torture inflicted on him, is “fabrication”, he said, demanding “retraction” and accusing Yonhap of “corruption” for having run the story without his approval.

Just what happened to the 31-year-old crusader after he entered North Korea bearing a message of “God’s love” for North Korea’s late leader Kim Jong-Il is not clear. What is known is that, when he was packed off to Beijing on an Air Koryo flight and released into the hands of an American diplomat, he was a broken man.

He’s still not saying exactly what got the North Koreans to say, before his release two years ago, on Feb. 9, 2010, that he had “seriously repented of the wrong I committed, taken in by the West’s false propaganda”. Whatever it was, he’s been confined off and on to mental hospitals in Long Beach, California, and his native Tucson, Arizona, and lives in constant mental agony.

Gradually, however, Park is recovering to the point at which he can muster the strength and concentration to crusade full-time against what he says is the “genocide” committed by North Korea’s leaders against their own people. At the same time, he’s resolved to sue in the United States against North Korea for the “torture” inflicted on him — and hopes to recover funds from North Korean overseas accounts that he can then dedicate to his crusade.

But what did the North Koreans really do to him?

Park, often reluctant to talk to journalists, exploded in our conversation while talking about the Yonhap report quoting him as saying North Korean women had “surrounded me and did the worst thing to me to try to make me commit suicide”. The report said he had described how the women “beat his genitals with a club to ‘make me not to have a baby and get married forever.’ ”

One of the women mocked his evangelical Christian faith while he was suffering under the glare of a bright light, according to the Yonhap story, asking, “If your God is so great, why doesn’t he save you?”

Park, if anything, is more committed now than he was when he entered North Korea with a letter pleading for then-leader Kim Jong-Il to “please open your borders so we may bring food, provisions, medicine, necessities, and assistance to those who are struggling to survive”.

Those demands may not have been quite so upsetting to the North Koreans as his plea to “please close down all concentration camps and release all political prisoners today”. North Korea has repeatedly denied the existence of a vast gulag system that’s believed to be large enough for about 200,000 prisoners, new arrivals constantly replacing those who die of disease, hunger and overwork or are executed.

At the time of his release, Park said nothing as he was whisked by reporters before boarding the flight from Beijing to Los Angeles, but the impression was perhaps the North Koreans had brainwashed him into believing that life there was not so bad after all.

That impression was soon disproved as Park vanished for months into the care of family members, activists and doctors battling to enable him to lead a normal life. Suffering from what doctors agree is a classic case of “post-traumatic stress disorder”, Park has alternated between stages of suicidal depression and exhilaration over his campaign against North Korean “genocide”.

In his conversation with me, Park appeared near-suicidal again as a result of the Yonhap article. Asking me for advice on what to do, I reminded him he could do nothing about North Korea if he weren’t around to conduct his campaign. I also urged him to “forget the Yonhap story”, telling him, “It doesn’t matter what they say, it’s what you think and know that counts.”

By Thursday, he seemed to have regained enough composure to be able to tell me, by e-mail, “Currently my life is focused on three things.”

First, Park wrote, he hoped to prove, by writing articles and encouraging “the protest movement that North Korea is in fact committing genocide and crimes against humanity, mass atrocities”. “The international community,” he said, “has a responsibility to protect millions of North Korean victims.”

Second, he wants “to meet with Samantha Power” — U.S. President Barack Obama’s special assistant on human rights with the National Security Council — “and others in the U.S. government and confront them on this matter”.

“The humanitarian and human-rights emergency in North Korea should no longer be trumped by fears/concerns over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction,” he wrote. “The only way the security issue will be resolved is by toppling regime, any objective observer knows that.”

Third, he would like to obtain funding for “North Korean victims”. “Many of my closest friends are North Korean refugees who have contacts inside,” he wrote. “Hope and pray there will be a movement to get behind North Korean defectors’ remittances so that people in North Korea will be able to subsist, defend themselves, and so that they will know we love them. ”

“Remittances can avert a military conflict by conveying our love and solidarity with the North Korean people and exposing the North Korean system and lies about South Korea and the world in general,” said Park, “so that when intervention eventually takes place (which we are calling for through these protests and in every possible way) there could be a quick surrender and re-unification. ”

But does Park think his campaign stands a chance of acceptance? “It may sound like a pipe dream to most,” he wrote, “not to me”.

While spreading the word about North Korea, however, Park remains outraged by the Yonhap report. He never met the Yonhap reporter who wrote the article, he told me, and says the details it offered were not accurate.

He fears the article could damage his chances of winning a law suit against North Korea and feels he has to set the record straight before actually going to court.

But to whom did Park speak, and why did Yonhap carry the article? Yonhap has not responded publicly, and Park has not offered an alternative version of his ordeal.

Interestingly, however, he has not denied the accuracy of a report by Pyongyang’s Korea Central News Agency on why the regime let him go.

“The relevant organ of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] decided to leniently forgive and release him, taking his admission and sincere repentance of his wrong doings into consideration,” said the KCNA article, put out five days before his release.

“What I have seen and heard in the DPRK convinced me that I misunderstood it,” Park was quoted as saying, “so I seriously repented of the wrong I committed, taken in by the West’s false propaganda.”

All that Park has said is that he was forced into “a false confession”. Only he knows what the North Koreans did to extract it from him.

  Air Koryo, Haunted by North Korean ordeal, Kim Jong-Il, Korea Central News Agency, Robert Park, Samantha Power, Traumatized by N. Korean ordeal, Tumen River, U.S. activist pleads for ‘international community to protect millions of victims’, Yonhap