The mystery is compounded by the fact that the 28-year-old Park after his return to his home in Arizona was taken against his will, apparently drugged, to the psychiatric ward of a hospital in Long Beach, California, on March 3. His hospital stay was cloaked in legality — he had a hearing in which he was ruled to be "gravely disabled", at risk of either suicide or doing harm, possibly killing, those close to him, including his parents, both immigrants from South Korea with relatives in North Korea.
Park was not, however, a patient for long. A judge ordered his release two days later after a hearing in which he managed to convince the court that he did not pose a threat to anyone. That done, he was expected to give one press conference after another — first outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington and then, on March 15, outside the office building on Second Avenue in New York, near the United Nations, where North Korea maintains its UN mission.
The reason for canceling the latter was a severe storm that forced the cancellation of planes, but that excuse seems flimsy since all flights quickly resumed and the press conference was never rescheduled.
Park, who entered North Korea at the behest of human-rights activists loosely banded under the names, "Unify Korea", "Pax Koreana" and "Freedom and Life for All North Koreans," appears to have been at odds with his handlers. They want him to tell his story for the shock effect of revealing the iniquities meted out by the North Koreans, but the truth may be so unspeakable that he wants nothing more than to remain silent.
The worst that may have happened, in the view of those who try to follow the sweeping record of human-rights violations in North Korea, is that he was subjected to sexual abuse too degrading and humiliating for him to be able to discuss willingly.
Sexual exploitation by North Korean police and security agents is hardly new. It's well known that North Korean women have been used in massage parlors, hotels and bars in China to compromise foreign business people and missionaries in order to gather information, and sexual torture in prisons has also become widespread.
Kang Cho-hwan, who described his decade in the Yodok camp in the book Aquariums of Pyongyang, has written that "rape and sexual torture of female political prisoners" have been commonplace for the past 10 years. In an article for the newspaper Chosun Ilbo, for which he works as a reporter and commentator on North Korea, he quotes a recent defector as saying "it has become routine for security agents to sexually abuse female prisoners."
Another defector is quoted as describing security agents in Sinuiju, the North Korean city across the Yalu River from the Chinese city of Dandong, as having "stripped the female defectors regardless of their age and sexually tortured them, while agents did things to them that are hard to describe in words".
But what are North Korean agents doing to men? Reports of business people, notably South Korean businessmen and missionaries, caught in compromising positions with North Korean female intelligence operatives are one thing, but how about stripping and raping male prisoners? Kang Cho-hwan wrote in the newspaper that "sexual abuse" of Robert Park "was probably intended to break his will and exact a fabricated apology", but gives no details of what abuse occurred.
The implication is that North Korean interrogators used techniques similar to those employed by rogue American soldiers guarding Iraqi prisoners at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad several years ago.
NK Radio for North Korea, which broadcasts two hours daily via short-wave into North Korea from Seoul, elaborated on North Korean "sexual torture" — "a torture technique in which victims are physically and psychologically attacked". The goal is for victims to "become powerless with no defense capability during torture", said NK Open Radio. Techniques "include forcing people to strip naked, sitting in a humiliating posture and then be raped".
Jo Sung-rae, the co-leader with Park of the human-rights coalition "Freedom and Life for All North Koreans", was somewhat more specific in a broadcast interview but left out details that might have been especially embarrassing. Park "went through sexual abuse in detention conducted by North Korean women", said Jo. "He told me that they stripped him naked, touched him, and tortured him in a drunken state."
Park, "never having experienced sex in his whole life", according to the report of the interview, was evidently "troubled by a feeling of shame and humiliation after the sexual torture, even showing signs of being suicidal".
NK Radio report included lurid details on specific cases — though not on Robert Park. A male prisoner "was told to be naked in front of men and women", said the report. "When he disobeyed, he was brutally stepped on by security agents while his two hands were tied." A female prisoner "was forced to do a pumping action, repeating sitting and standing, with no clothes on and hands up".
The idea in the case of the female prisoner was "to see hidden money or jewelry coming out of the anus or womb", said the report. "If nothing comes out, a female agent forced us to lay down and searched inside of womb with rubber-gloved hands. They also searched our clothes inside and out, including brassieres." In most such cases, said NK Radio, "investigators committed these inhumane treatments in order to extort money, although it had nothing to do with the victims' crimes" — that is, defecting from North Korea.
The case of Robert Park could have been far worse. At a rally that I attended in Seoul, however, Jo Sung-rae was less than forthcoming when I talked to him afterward. "Robert Park didn't want to share this information," he told me, explaining Park's reluctance to speak out. "He's going to read a statement in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington," he said, in which he would protest the refusal of Chinese authorities to accept North Korean defectors as refugees rather than return them to prison in North Korea. Park never appeared and never issued that statement.
Jo offered another possible reason for his silence. "I think Robert Park is worried about his family in Korea," he said, alluding to distant relatives who remain in the North. "His grandmother's family on his father's side moved from North to South Korea. He doesn't want anything bad happening to his relatives."
Could the North Koreans be holding relatives hostage to keep Park from telling his story? That sounds possible, but it was the first I'd heard of it in this case. And, even if true, why has Park avoided any comment, and why was he hauled, however briefly, to a mental hospital in California?
"All North Korean people are suffering," was all Jo would tell me. "They are his main concern."
