Georgetown students gathered with a diverse group of 300 students, legislators, activists and humanitarian leaders on the Capitol lawn Wednesday morning for a rally to raise awareness of human rights abuses and religious persecution in North Korea. Approximately 15 students in Georgetown’s Korean Student Association attended the rally.

The rally was organized and sponsored by the North Korea Freedom Coalition, a bipartisan group of American and Korean human rights and religious leaders, as the focal point of the coalition’s North Korea Freedom Day, a day of activism and awareness-raising that also featured lobbying and speeches by North Korean political defectors.

Attendees of the rally carried flags and banners showing photos of emaciated North Korean refugees with statements including “Death and Desperation” and “What `Dear Leader’ starves his own people?” They demanded that the world take a more proactive stance in addressing human rights and religious freedoms under the dictatorial administration of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, with several North Korean political defectors speaking at the rally and to underscore this message.

“The fact that human rights abuses are going unheard in North Korea is really aggravating to me,” Sungin Marshall (COL ’07), a member of KSA and Amnesty International at Georgetown, said. “Through events like these, the issue will be heard, and hopefully something will be done.”

Speakers at the rally addressed the tortures the North Korean government has committed against practicing Christians, political dissidents and women who tried to flee the nation. Some compared North Korean prisons to Soviet gulags, and spoke of past genocides. “Each generation we look back on the prior and ask, why didn’t they act with what they knew?” Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) said.

Brownback, along with several Congressmen, discussed the North Korea Freedom Act that Brownback introduced to the Senate in November 2003. The Act, which was co-sponsored by Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), calls for stronger measures to be taken to defend human rights in North Korea, among other provisions. Rep. Joseph Pitts (R-Pa.) and Jim Leach (R-Iowa), who also spoke at the rally, co-sponsored a similar bill, the North Korea Human Rights Act of 2004, in the House of Representatives.

“The U.S. has a lot of responsibility,” Milene Candelaresi (COL ’07), a member of KSA, said in reference to previous American involvement in the region during the Korean and Cold Wars.

Eurae Muhn (COL ’04), co-president of the Korean Students Association, echoed that sentiment in an e-mail following the rally.

“[We] are hopeful that greater awareness of the atrocities occurring in North Korea will lead to improvements in providing relief to our brothers and sisters who are living in unbearable conditions and being subject to violence and human rights violations everyday,” she wrote.

Muhn added that, through events such as the Human Rights in North Korea conference that the group held on campus last Monday, her group hopes to “raise the level of concern for the North Koreans who are suffering.”