A Monk’s Earthly Mission:
Easing North Koreans’ Pain
By CHOE SANG-HUN, April
27, 2012 , SEOUL, South Korea
it would have been better if the author had touched Pomnyun's view on Korean re-unification which is linked to the humanitarian aid in lieu of what brought him to the establishment of Good Friends)
IN August 1996, the
Venerable Pomnyun, a Buddhist monk from South Korea, was cruising down the Yalu
River between China and North Korea when
he saw a boy squatting alone at the North Korean edge of the water. The boy was
in rags, his gaunt face covered in dirt.
Pomnyun shouted to
him, but the boy did not respond. Pomnyun’s Chinese companion explained that
North Korean children were instructed never to beg from foreigners. And when
Pomnyun asked if the boat could be steered closer to the child to bring help,
he was reminded that they could not enter North Korean territory.
“Never before had I
realized the meaning of a border so painfully until that day,” said Pomnyun,
59. “Never before had I felt so acutely that Korea is a divided nation.”
The encounter led him
to establish one of the first relief campaigns for North Korean refugees and to
take on an unlikely role for a Buddhist monk. Today, rather than leading a
secluded life of quiet contemplation, he is a well-known commentator on North
Korea, his online newsletter an important source of information smuggled out of
the isolated country.
Before his Yalu trip,
Pomnyun had refused to believe his Chinese acquaintances’ stories about
countless North Koreans dying of hunger as the country’s food rationing system
collapsed in the midst of a famine. But once he was confronted with the
evidence, the monk, who was already running a charity in India, sent volunteers
to northeastern China, providing food and shelter for the thousands of North
Korean refugees who had begun straggling over the river border.
When his organization,
Good Friends, released photographs of the bodies of North Koreans who had
drowned in the river, too exhausted to complete the last leg of their desperate
journey for food, it provided some of the first documentation of what was later
recognized as one of the most horrific famines of the late 20th century. As
many as three million people out of a population of 22 million died of hunger
or hunger-related diseases.
WHAT shook Pomnyun was
not only the tales that refugees told of families trying to live on pine tree
bark and wild roots, but also the outside world’s ignorance of their plight.
“World leaders and the
media talked obsessively about Kim Jong-il and his nuclear weapons and
missiles,” Pomnyun said. “But what about the North Korean people?”
Pomnyun’s group began
to chronicle the disaster, interviewing more than 5,000 refugees as they arrived
in China and publishing a series of reports and books on their struggles. When
Good Friends began publishing its newsletter in 2004, it quickly became a
must-read among South Korean policy makers and journalists.
The first of its kind,
the newsletter provided timely accounts of life in North Korea from anonymous
informers inside the country, some of whom had returned home after being aided
by the charity. They communicated via smuggled cellphones and other means that
Pomnyun refused to disclose.
When the newsletter,
North Korea Today, also went online, it became a prototype for other Web sites.
Together, the sites have helped breach what had been a near-total information
blackout on North Korea for decades. They monitor the price of food and carry
running, though sometimes conflicting, updates on floods and epidemics.
Pomnyun leads his own
temple in a provincial town, as well as study programs in meditation and
Buddhist scripture across the country. Born to a rural farming family, Pomnyun
grew up with older brothers who were religiously and politically active; one
was sentenced to death under the military dictatorship of the time for
antigovernment activity, but was later released.
The younger Pomnyun at
first hoped to become a physicist or an astronomer. But when he was in high
school, a chance meeting with a revered monk named Domun persuaded him to
become an activist, starting campaigns for environmental protection, religious
reform, aid for the hungry and unification of the two Koreas. He was arrested and
tortured by government agents cracking down on dissidents during the military
rule.
Today, Pomnyun pursues
his mission very much amid the secular world. His office in Seoul is in a back
alley crammed with restaurants, bars and “love hotels,” where people meet for
trysts. Government officials call to compare notes on North Korea. He travels
to the United States to give lectures attended by academics and government
analysts.
His writings and
appearances — he gives an average of 12 lectures a week on a range of topics,
including how to be a good mother — have made him among the country’s
best-known monks. “Pomnyun quotes” are widely shared online. A recent one went:
“Even if the North Koreans are said to be our enemy, they are fellow Koreans.
While we are turning our surplus rice into animal feed, North Korean children
are dying of hunger. What would our ancestors say of this?”
His social activism
has even drawn him into the tumult of South Korean politics, especially after
lectures that he organized for young audiences on topics like how to fight for
social justice provided a platform for Ahn Cheol-soo, a software developer and
a vocal critic of the governing New Frontier Party. Mr. Ahn is now cited in
opinion polls as a leading contender in the presidential election in December,
should he choose to run.
Allinkorea.net, a rightist news
outlet, has made Pomnyun a favorite target, calling him a “political demagogue
wearing the mask of religion.”
POMNYUN’S tireless
appeals for more aid for North Koreans have not always been popular in the
South, where sentiment toward the North vacillates between compassion and fear.
In 2006 and 2009, his
group’s reports on destructive floods and an outbreak of swine flu in North Korea
prompted the South Korean government to set aside politics and send aid. But
his appeals have gone largely unheeded under President Lee Myung-bak’s conservative
administration, which has accused Pomnyun of exaggerating the latest food
crisis. Pomnyun has countered that the government is playing politics with
people’s welfare. In 2008, he went on a 70-day hunger strike to
highlight North Koreans’ plight.
Good Friends’
statistical methods in its early studies led even some relief experts to accuse
the group of exaggerating the famine, either unwittingly or to promote its case
for aid. But Rajiv Narayan, a researcher on North Korea at Amnesty
International, said the early work, even if flawed, “helped us understand what
was going on in North Korea.” He added of Pomnyun, “People in our circles
listen to him.”
Pomnyun says he takes
the criticism in stride. “Progressives criticize me for drawing attention to
human rights violations in the North, and conservatives attack me for calling
for aid for the North,” Pomnyun said, adding that he had also, depending on the
critic, been accused of working for the C.I.A. or the North Korean government.
“My aim is neither to support nor to oppose North Korea. I am just drawing
attention to the humanitarian crisis.”
For that reason,
Pomnyun is deeply skeptical not only of his own country’s policies toward North
Korea, but also of the United States’ focus on the threat the country poses.
“The problem,” Pomnyun
said, “is the more you squeeze the North Koreans, the more desperate they
become to develop nuclear weapons. The Americans keep asking, ‘Why do the North
Koreans make nuclear weapons while their people are starving?’ That may be a
good way of criticizing North Korea, but it’s not a good way of influencing a
paranoid regime whose overriding priority is self-preservation.”
