Puget Sound club Model United Nations is bringing non-profit organization LiNK to campus on April 7 and 8 to raise awareness of the struggles North Korean people go through every day. The presentation will be threefold: the organization will table in Wheelock Student Center on April 7, and give a joint lecture and documentary showing on the 8.
LiNK, which stands for Liberty in North Korea, is an organization run by dedicated and passionate individuals who commit their lives to raising awareness and funds to help refugees who have already escaped from North Korea. When someone escapes North Korea, they are extremely vulnerable to, among other things, being pulled into sex trafficking, forced labor or being deported back to North Korea. This is largely due to the limited language and cultural knowledge that they have. Through LiNK, refugees can find the sanctuary, education and support that are needed to start a new life in a country whose culture you know very little about.
While news such as the antics of Kim Jong Un and the failed missile launch are widely circulated and often looked at in a comical light, it undermines the everyday tragedy that North Korean citizens must endure. “When Kim Jong Un executes his uncle, it’s all over the news, but when an average farmer starves to death because his government isn’t giving any food out, or when a college student is dragged to a detainment camp and tortured because they had some interest in a religion other than worshiping Kim Jong Un and his ancestors, we don’t hear about it,” senior and founder of Model United Nations (MUN) Jinshil Yi said.
“[LiNK] emphasizes the fact that many people don’t know things such things as the fact that every two and half minutes, a North Korean dies of starvation. This is one of the biggest human rights violations of our time and people don’t even know about it because it is masked by the politics of the region,” MUN Co-president Connie Trettin said.
Rather than focus on changing the politics of North Korea, which would make the group a political activist group, LiNK focuses on helping the individual, making it very much a humanitarian group. “These are people who have suffered tremendously in their homeland, and that’s kind of easy to forget with the aid of social media…in North Korea, generally the only news you hear is what Kim Jong Un is doing, and he does not accurately represent the human tragedy that has been going on since the 1950’s,” MUN member Walter Streeter said.
It’s nearly impossible to maintain perspective on this issue for people who have grown up within a democracy and who have had the privileges that many people in the United States take for granted. However, LiNK does its best to make sure that their cause does not sink into the background.
“All the news outlets have been talking non-stop about the crisis and revolutions in the Ukraine and Syria, but there are long-term issues that get shown in the news and then disappear without ever actually being resolved. North Korea is one of those issues and I think LiNK does a great job of focusing on the long-term consequence of Kim Jong Un’s actions,” MUN member Polliwog Park said.
“In a campus like UPS, we feel like we are definitely a privileged elite, studying at a liberal arts college, all of us can benefit from expanding our horizons from North-end Tacoma, beyond the Pacific Northwest, to really see what sort of a world we live in and to what end we are being educated so that we can use our skills to better the world that we live in,” Yi said.
There has been a lot of talk about the difficulty students are having “breaking out of the Puget Sound/Tacoma bubble”, and though there are a multitude of opportunities for students to break that barrier, educating oneself about global events is one of the key ways that students can participate in something larger than themselves. “Being able to connect with the ethnic people that we are living with in the Tacoma and Seattle area as well as spreading awareness of international events on Earth, it’s really helpful to have them here,” Yin said.
For students that want to donate but aren’t sure how, MUN is making it easy by hosting a bake sale on April 8 all day, and all proceeds will go toward LiNK. To learn more about LiNK, check out their website at https://www.libertyinnorthkorea.org/. LiNK is well known for its transparency policy, so when a person donates, they are told exactly how many people they helped and how they were helped.