AIM Report: Pandering to the Victicrats
AIM Report | February 15, 2001
As president, Bush’s response has been to pander to them.
In sharp contrast to President Bush's plea for "civil discourse" with his political enemies, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas gave a powerful speech at the American Enterprise Institute banquet on Feb. 13, urging a serious and potentially divisive debate on major public policy issues, including race relations. He cautioned, however, that "active citizens" who challenged the liberal agenda would be branded "mean-spirited, racist, Uncle Tom, homophobic, sexist, etc."
Thomas recalled that when he gave an interview years ago to a Washington Post reporter and was critical of such "sacred policies" as affirmative action, welfare and school busing, he "had never been called such names in my entire life." Thomas added, "It became clear in rather short order that on the very difficult issues such as race there was no real debate or honest discussion. Those who raised questions that suggested doubt about popular policies were subjected to intimidation. Debate was not permitted. Orthodoxy was enforced. When whites questioned the conventional wisdom on these issues, it was considered bad form; when blacks did so, it was treason."
Fortunately, there are black Americans in addition to Justice Thomas who are willing to take the risk. John McWhorter, a young professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, has written a brutally honest book about race relations in America titled Losing the Race. In it, he shows how victimology, separatism and anti-intellectualism have come to dominate the black community. McWhorter describes many of the real problems affecting blacks, including black student underachievement, which he has witnessed first-hand, and explains why affirmative action is an "evil" that hurts, not helps, black people.
McWhorter's book complements one by Larry Elder, the popular radio talk show host and columnist based in Los Angeles. Elder's powerful book, The Ten Things You Can't Say in America, introduced the term "victicrat" to describe those liberal blacks who enrich themselves by peddling the notion that blacks in America are the victims of white conspiracies. Elder says the victicrats have dominated the discussion of race relations in the U.S. Among those he names are Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and syndicated columnist Julianne Malveaux, who has declared there is no one "great white bigot," only "about 200 million little white ones."
Malveaux has also said she hopes Clarence Thomas's wife is feeding him lots of cholesterol-laden foods because she wants to see him die young from a heart attack. Those who criticize the "us-versus-them" pitch are regarded as the enemy because they are attacking the means whereby the victicrats live. Like Justice Thomas, Elder was himself targeted by the victicrats. A black campaign tried to force him off the air in 1998.
Despite the determined efforts of the Bush-Cheney campaign to loosen the grip of the Democrats on the black vote, they won a lower percentage of the black vote than Dole and Kemp won in 1996. Bush addressed the NAACP convention, but the reception was cool. That was to be expected because the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, led by former Congressman Kweisi Mfume, has become a virtual arm of the Democratic Party. It is run by victicrats who have nothing but scorn for those, black or white, who believe the advancement of colored people should depend on their ability and the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
The Victicrats in Action
"Why Don't Black Americans Give Bush a Chance?" was the title of an op-ed article by John McWhorter in the Washington Post on Dec. 31. He said that the gap between blacks and whites in school performance is one reason why blacks could find commonality with the Bush administration. Bush, he said, favors school choice and accountability from local school boards for the performance of students and teachers. But instead of supporting Bush's efforts to improve the education of black children, the leading victicrats were challenging the outcome of the election, making unfounded claims that blacks had been prevented from voting in Florida. This is an example of how the victicrats ignore the real problems in the black community and promote themselves by fanning racial tensions.
As president, Bush's response has been to pander to them. He met with the Congressional Black Caucus soon after taking office and has talked occasionally to Jesse Jackson. He even offered his sympathies when the National Enquirer exposed the fact that only two years ago, Jackson had fathered an illegitimate child by one of his employees and had used $40,000 from one of his tax-exempt organizations to move her and the child from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles.
Echoing Clinton On Racial Profiling
At the Conservative Political Action Conference in January, Rep. Asa Hutchinson urged conservatives to enhance the Republican Party's appeal to minorities by helping eliminate racial profiling. Hutchinson, who is on the House Subcommittee on Crime, described it as "a morally bankrupt practice" that should play no role in a policeman's decision on whether to question, arrest or use surveillance on an individual.
In June 1999, President Clinton said racial profiling was "the opposite of good police work where actions are based on hard facts, not stereotypes." Saying, "It is wrong, it is destructive and it must stop," he ordered federal law enforcement agencies to collect data on the race and gender of the people they stop to question. He also declared his support for legislation to force state and local police to do the same thing. Rep. Hutchinson was echoing Clinton, who was always quick to pander to the victicrats.
Clinton was responding to the uproar created by reports of disparities in the treatment of whites and blacks by New Jersey state troopers. In 1997-98, they stopped more than twice as many white drivers for traffic violations on the New Jersey Turnpike as black drivers. But they searched only a fifth of the cars driven by whites and over half of the cars driven by blacks. This was viewed as proof that the troopers are racists, but the fact is that they searched a fifth of the whites' cars and nearly half of the black-driven cars because there are indicators besides race that they use in trying to spot drug traffickers. One is evidence that the driver has driven a long time without stopping, because traffickers don't like to leave their cargo unguarded.
In his Feb. 27 address to the joint session of Congress President Bush also echoed Bill Clinton. He said he had asked Attorney General John Ashcroft "to develop specific recommendations to end racial profiling." He explained, "It is wrong and we will end it in America." Two days later, Ashcroft, whose confirmation was bitterly opposed by the victicrats, said he would give Congress six months to find ways to collect data on racial profiling by law enforcement officers and "to assess the extent and nature of such practices." He said that if Congress didn't act, he would launch his own study because this was such an important issue.
The Case For Racial Profiling
The effect of this is to continue the image of blacks as victims of a white racist society. This plays into the hands of the victicrats, increases bitterness and resentment, and frustrates legitimate efforts to solve black problems. John McWhorter defends racial profiling on the simple and logical ground that blacks commit a disproportionate number of crimes.
He says, "Even a police force devoid of racism, and never abusive or discourteous in stop-and-frisk encounters, would in some areas have to stop more black people than white to prevent crime effectively...All of us know that, especially since the 1980s, there has been a violent drug trade run by urban minority men. Certainly this would lead black men in certain places to be more likely to be carrying drugs." He points out that even black police officers engage in racial profiling, targeting blacks because they know who's committing the crimes. He asks, "How many of us could look this man [a black police officer] in the eye and tell him he should concentrate on the Latina mothers pushing baby carriages and the white Temple University professors waiting at traffic lights driving to work?"
This is a subtle reminder to those who condemn racial profiling that the police everywhere routinely practice gender profiling and age profiling. They do so for the very good reason that men commit far more crimes than women and young men commit far more crimes than senior citizens. To order New Jersey state troopers to stop ten white drivers for every black they pull over makes about as much sense as ordering them to make sure they stop one female driver for every male and one person over 65 for every two persons between 18 and 34. Only the criminals would endorse that policy, since it would greatly reduce their risk of being caught.
Prosecuting the Police
Governor Christine Todd Whitman, who now heads the Environmental Protection Agency, fired State Police Superintendent Col. Carl Williams for telling the truth in saying that minority groups are more likely to be connected to certain drug crimes. The New York Times huffed that his comments were "insensitive" toward blacks and Hispanics. This led to a major investigation of the state police and demands for hiring more members of minority groups as state troopers. Honesty was sacrificed to political correctness then, and the same thing is happening now. Gilbert Gallegos, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said in 1999 that the impact of the approach being imposed on the New Jersey state troopers would be a sharp decrease in traffic stops and a sharp decrease in major arrests resulting from such stops. And this means more criminals getting away with crime.
President Bush does not agree with that. In his speech to Congress he said that in ending racial profiling, "we will not hinder the work of our brave police officers. They protect us every day, often at great risk. But by stopping the abuses of a few, we will add to the confidence our police officers earn and deserve."
On February 2, the State of New Jersey agreed to pay $12.95 million to four young men — three blacks and a Hispanic — because they were fired upon by two state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1998. The troopers said they pulled the four, traveling in a van, over for speeding, and fired in self-defense after the vehicle rolled backward in the direction of one of the troopers. Three of the four were hit. The four men, who didn't have any drugs, alleged they were pulled over because of their race and hired O.J. Simpson's attorney, Johnnie Cochran, to represent them. Al Sharpton became their spokesman. The troopers were suspended and have been charged with attempted murder and aggravated assault.
The settlement of this tragic but rare case was followed by a decision by New Jersey Attorney General John J. Farmer to dismiss drug and contraband charges against 128 defendants who claimed they were victims of racial profiling. Farmer admitted that the defendants, all of them drivers pulled over by the state police, were criminals who had been caught breaking the law. But he said he wanted to dismiss the charges and move on. On the other hand, troopers involved in apprehending these criminals were going to be investigated and possibly punished for using race in stopping and searching cars. Trooper David Jones, a vice president of the State Troopers Fraternal Association, commented, "Clearly the path of least resistance is to prosecute a trooper administratively rather than to prose-cute a criminal that preys on our society."
Hate Crimes
Like racial profiling, "hate crimes" are used by the victicrats and the media to portray blacks as victims of white racist society. They want special laws to prosecute perpetrators of such crimes. The National Crime Victimization Survey shows that out of 1.7 million interracial violent crimes reported in 1997, about 1.2 million involved blacks and whites. About 90 percent of these involve a black perpetrator and a white victim. If the percent-ages of blacks and whites who commit these crimes were the same as their percentages of the total population, about 83 percent would be committed by whites. The proportions are almost the reverse of this.
The FBI has put out data that indicate that of approximately 1.2 million violent crimes involving whites and blacks, hatred was a motive in only about half of one percent of the more than a million cases where blacks attacked whites. They also say that hatred was a motive in about 1.3 percent of the approximately 120,000 violent crimes in which whites attacked blacks. To assert that whites, who commit only 10 percent of the white-black inter-racial violent crimes, are motivated by hate 2.6 times as often as blacks strains credulity.
Consider just two things: (1) the torrent of hate speech and incitement to violence against whites that comes from influential blacks, ranging from rap artists to religious leaders, and (2) the double standard that prevails in the news media in reporting violence against blacks by whites and violence against whites by blacks. The same political correctness that explains the media's heavy coverage of white-on-minority racial crimes and their failure to treat minority-on-white crimes the same way is seen in law enforcement agencies like the FBI.
A 1999 study titled "The Color of Crime" by Jared Taylor, the editor of American Renaissance, says, "If a Mexican is assaulted for reasons of ethnicity, he is officially recorded as Hispanic. However, he becomes white if he commits a hate crime against a black. Even more absurdly, if a Mexican commits a hate crime against a white, both the victim and the perpetrator are reported as white." The recorded hate crimes for 1997 include 636 crimes of anti-Hispanic bias, but not one of the known hate-crime offenders is recorded as Hispanic, because the FBI counts Hispanic offenders as white..
Antiwhite Hate Speech
In his book, The Myths That Divide Us, John Perazzo has provided a frightening array of inflammatory racist remarks by influential blacks. The most notorious was this from black rapper Sister Souljah in May 1992: "If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?" Jesse Jackson said she was a voice representing "the feelings and hopes of a whole generation" of young blacks. Derrick Bell, a black Harvard law professor, has predicted that white wickedness will give rise to new black leaders who will urge that blacks "go out in gangs and kill a whole lot of white people."
The late Khalid Muhammad, a former aide to Louis Farrakhan, was one such leader. Perazzo says that after the unfortunate killing of Amadou Diallo by New York police in 1999, "Muhammad called the NYPD 'an organized death corps', and urged city blacks to kill whites in retaliation." He added, "There's medicine in the murder. There's healing in the killing."
Perazzo cites LeRoi Jones, a black poet who changed his name to Amiri Baraka. "In one of his poems," Perazzo writes, "he asserts that blacks are justified in robbing or even killing whites, because the latter 'already stole' everything from the former. In the same poem, Baraka described 'the magic dance' of enraged blacks mugging whites in the streets. 'Take their lives if need be, he wrote, exhorting blacks to smash 'jellywhite faces' and then dance in celebration of their conquest."
The Media Double Standard
Perazzo shows that the news media try to cover up the fact that many black attacks on whites are motivated by racial hatred. The murder of six and wounding of 17 passengers on a Long Island train by Colin Ferguson on Dec. 7, 1993, is a notable example. Perazzo writes: "While all local news broadcasts that evening led with this story, and every New York newspaper gave it front-page headlines the following day, not a single report mentioned the gunman's skin color. Clothing color, however, was somehow deemed newsworthy by the New York Times, which provided the media's most detailed description of the shooter as 'a husky-looking man dressed in white....Ferguson openly acknowledged that he had acted for purely racial reasons. (This) forced the media to report...not only that the gunman was black, but that every one of his victims was either white or Asian.'"
There were no reports on the literature found in Ferguson's room, and despite his admission of his motive, a New York Times editorial said, "The usual imperative of those who would contemplate an event like (the) Long Island Rail Road massacre is to 'make sense' of it. While the wish is reasonable, no more sense can be made of such a thing than of a typhoon or cyclone. Forget the gunman's declared motive of racial hatred: when someone with a semiautomatic weapon starts perforating citizens en masse, the question of motive evaporates."
Perazzo points out that no such analysis was made of the motive in "any instance of white-on-black crime in memory." He says that in those cases, "civil rights leaders and social commentators were virtually unanimous in attributing the perpetrators' violence to racism. Colin Ferguson was, for the most part, exempted from such charges; the slaughter he engineered was widely accepted as the bitter fruit of a crazed man's mental imbalance." The most important lesson the major media found in this case was that handguns are the problem, not antiwhite racism. The media gave more attention to Ferguson's gun than to the ideas that had been planted in his head by influential blacks, helping fuel the drive for stronger gun control.
The contrast between the media coverage of this and other black-on-white murders and white-on-black murders is mind-boggling. Typically, in the black-on-white cases there is little or no national coverage of the story. If it is covered, the race of the killer is reported belatedly, if at all, and there is little or no investigation of whether or not he hates whites. If there is such evidence, the authorities try to keep it under wraps and the media refrain from doing their own investigations. These stories have no legs. They generate no public outrage and are soon forgotten. That, of course, is the objective of both the authorities and the media.
The white-on-black murders get exactly the opposite treatment. They get heavy coverage in the print and electronic media. The racial views of the perpetrators are investigated. If they are found to have a record of being antiblack, that becomes the story. It may become the story even if there no evidence to support it. The memory of the crimes are kept alive for years, and some of them even get into the history books. They generate outrage on the part of both whites and blacks, and they are added to the arsenals of those who are striving to inflame racial hatred against whites.
Howard Beach: White On Black
The death of a 23-year-old black named Michael Griffiths on Dec. 19, 1986 in the white, middle-class community of Howard Beach in Queens, New York illustrates this contrast. Perazzo devotes five pages in his book to what happened there and the aftermath. This is a brief summary.
Griffiths and two friends had car trouble and went to Howard Beach to make a phone call. They were accosted by a dozen white teenagers who shouted racial epithets and attacked them with a baseball bat and tree limbs after one of the blacks flashed a knife and returned their racial insults. One of them ran off after being hit in the head with a bat. Griffiths and the other victim were badly beaten, but they managed to escape. Griffiths ran onto a parkway, was hit by a car and killed.
This Perazzo writes: "The public clamor over this incident was deafening, the media coverage immense....Newspapers, magazines and broadcast stations across the nation examined the attack in extraordinary depth...." Demonstrations erupted, resulting in more news coverage. Mayor Ed Koch said, "This was the worst murder I believe has taken place in the modern era." Marches and demonstrations proliferated. Blacks armed with bats attacked whites, crying, "Howard Beach." The youths who attacked Michael Griffiths were convicted of manslaughter, since they didn't actually kill him. Hundreds of protesting blacks blocked rush-hour traffic in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Wilkinsburg: Black On White
On March 1, 2000, John Kroll, 55, was finishing up putting a new door on the apartment of Ronald Taylor in Wilkinsburg, a small town near Pittsburgh. Taylor, irritated by how long it was taking, first threatened to kill John DeWitt, 63, who was helping Kroll install the door. Emerging with a .22 caliber revolver, Taylor shot Kroll in the chest, killing him. Unable to find DeWitt, he headed for a Burger King up the street, where he killed Joseph Healey, 71, a part-time preacher at the Christian Church.
Crossing the street to a McDonald's, Taylor shot Richard Clinger, 56, in the head. He survived, but will never be normal. He then entered the restaurant and wounded Steven Bostard, 25, the assistant manager. He next shot and fatally wounded Emil Sanielevici, 20, who was waiting to be served at the drive-in window. He proceeded to Ross St., where he reloaded his gun and told a group of men, "I'm going down in a blaze of glory, and I'll shoot anybody white." All of Taylor's victims were white.
Fleeing to a building, he threatened three white women, telling a young black, "Not you, sister. You go." He grabbed a lady's arm, saying, "You look like a smart, white bitch. I won't shoot you; I'll terrorize you." He fled into another room, surrendering to the police a few hours later. He told the police he had some mental problems. He lived on Social Security SSI payments.
Taylor's crimes were motivated by an intense hatred of whites. Three good men died and two were seriously injured because he hated whites who paid most of the taxes that enabled him to eat and live in subsidized housing without working. He even hated those who worked to fix his door. Antiwhite writings were found in his apartment. Those who nurtured Taylor's hate share responsibility for the murders, but the police would not reveal their names or their messages.
There were no demonstrations to protest Taylor's deeds, no sermons condemning blacks. Leaflets reading "Black Crime, White Victims" and urging whites to "stand up and fight" circulated in a few nearby towns. They were denounced as the product of "hate groups" seeking to exacerbate tensions. The police investigated them. At the church where the murdered Joe Healey had preached, mourners were urged to pray for Ronald Taylor too "because he's one of God's children."
What You Can Do
Send the enclosed cards or your own cards or letters to , to William Borders of The New York Times, and to an editor of your choice. Rhoda Karpatkinof Consumers Union, to William Borders of The New York Times, editor and to an of your choice.
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF
By Reed Irvine
CLIFF KINCAID AND I HAVE DRAWN ON THREE RELATIVELY NEW BOOKS IN WRITING THIS report — The Ten Things You Can't Say in America by Larry Elder, the very popular black radio talk show host based in Los Angeles; Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America by John H. McWhorter, a black professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and The Myths That Divide Us: How Lies Have Poisoned American Race Relations by John Perazzo, who is white. All three are excellent antidotes to the oh-so politically correct articles dealing with race that are disseminated by the educational establishment and the establishment media. All deal in hard facts. They are not easy to find in most book stores, but they are available from AIM. Use the order form on the enclosed flyer that provides additional information about each book.
AS I WAS FINISHING WRITING ABOUT RACIAL HATE CRIMES IN THIS REPORT, I GOT AN E-MAIL FROM Seattle about the Mardi Gras riot in which one man was killed and 71 were injured. It said, "Roving bands of drunk black young men hunted down and beat whites. One is dead. Locals are up in arms, demanding the perps be hunted down, charged and prosecuted under municipal and state hate crimes laws. Local law enforcement has put out a call for photos, videos and other ways to identify those involved." The Seattle Times said Kristopher Kime, 20, was killed when a man smashed a bottle into his head from behind as he bent over to help a girl who had been knocked down. The Times said, "Several attackers set upon him wildly, kicking him in the head before moving on." According to the Times, "Witnesses said the man who hit Kime from behind was black, that he may have been part of a roving group of young black men and women who police say attacked many white partygoers in the crowd." One 18-year-old black was arrested after being identified from photos as a member of such a group. Kime's father told the Times that maybe his son's killer "was just mad at the world and was venting his anger." Black civil rights leaders protested that blacks were being blamed unjustly.
I HAVE BEEN INTENDING TO DISCUSS THE LETTER FROM CONSUMER UNION (CU) RECEIVED by those who sent in cards and letters to CU about the story in the Oct.-B AIM Report on their rigged tests on the Suzuki Samurai, but something kept coming up that squeezed it out. CU said the Samurai was "not acceptable," ruining sales in the U.S. market. This "victory" has been used to boost sales of CU's magazine, Consumer Reports. CU President Rhoda H. Karpatkin said in her letter that there were "many incorrect statements" in the AIM Report, but the only one she discussed was Suzuki's claim that CU "did not dispute the falsity of its statements about the Samurai." Our report was based largely on court pleadings in a suit Suzuki Motors has filed against CU. It gave specific videotaped examples of how CU tried many times to get the Samurai to tip so that two wheels were off the ground, with no success. We reported that two of the CU test drivers made statements to the effect that the vehicle deserved a high rating for stability. We also reported that Suzuki charged that CU editorial director Irwin Landau had told his staff, "If you can't find someone to roll this car, I will."
SUZUKI CLAIMS THAT CU'S TECHNICAL DIRECTOR ACCEPTED THE CHALLENGE AND TRIED nine times to get two wheels off the ground without success. He succeeded on the tenth try by turning the wheels so violently that the vehicle went off the test course. Suzuki charges that the videotape shows onlookers cheering because they had finally succeeded after 37 failures. It says that CU then constructed a new course to make it easier to replicate that one successful maneuver, but it was still hard to make the vehicle tip. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration said its tests showed the CU charges that the Samurai rolled over easily were not valid. Nevertheless, CU announced at a news conference that the Samurai "rolls over easily during routine driving" and was therefore rated not acceptable.
CU'S LETTER DOES NOT DISPUTE ANY OF THESE CHARGES ABOUT THE DIFFICULTY CU HAD in getting the Samurai to tip. If these charges are true, the claim that the Samurai rolled over easily is false, and CU knew it to be false. Ms. Karpatkin's letter says, "Nowhere in the record is there such an admission by CU... In fact, CU strongly believes that all of its tests and statements concerning the Samurai are true, fair and accurate." But if CU doesn't dispute the accuracy of the charges that they couldn't get the Samurai to tip on 37 tries, I don't see how anyone could say it was "true, fair and accurate" to say that it "rolls over easily in routine driving."
DR. FREDERIC WHITEHURST, THE FBI WHISTLEBLOWER, TOLD ME LAST WEEK THAT ROBERT Hanssen, the FBI spy, has to have a protector within the bureau. Fred had a good reason for saying that, and the New York Post has since reported that the FBI believes Fred is right, but for a different reason. They have disclosed that the Russians didn't pick up the bag of material that Hanssen left for them on the day they arrested him. That means someone in the bureau tipped them off. Things look worse and worse for Louis Freeh.
LAST DECEMBER, BILL BORDERS, AN EDITOR AT THE NEW YORK TIMES, UPBRAIDED ME for implying that he had agreed with me that Times reporter Jane Perlez had "wasted an opportunity to inform readers of the Times about how terrible conditions are for the people in North Korea" when she covered Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's visit to Pyongyang last October. Borders pointed out that she was confined to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. I interpreted that as meaning that Ms. Perlez and the Times would have loved to report how ordinary people live there if it had been humanly possible to do so. I cited a story by Washington Post reporter Steven Mufson who showed how hard life was for the unprivileged classes, contrasting it with Perlez's description of a department store patronized by the elite and a hearty luncheon she had enjoyed with some officials. I thought she had wasted a rare opportunity. Borders said he thought she "did quite a marvelous job on that trip."
CLIFF AND I HAVE JUST MET WITH DR. NORBERT VOLLERTSEN, A GERMAN DOCTOR WHO was stationed in North Korea for a year and a half. We learned that he had given Steven Mufson a tour that enabled him to report what life is like for the ordinary folk who live on the border of starvation. He told Mufson about the terrible conditions in North Korean hospitals — no material for surgery, no anesthesia, no sanitation and no money. He told us that he had offered to take Ms. Perlez on the same tour, but she declined his offer. The lunch and the department store were more alluring.
DR. VOLLERTSEN WAS THE CHIEF REPRESENTATIVE IN NORTH KOREA OF THE GERMAN Emergency Doctors, a medical aid group. He and a colleague, Francois Large, became famous because they lined up with Koreans to donate some of their skin to a worker at a factory who had suffered burns over three-fourths of his body. Dr. Vollertsen was awarded a medal and a passport available to very few foreigners that enabled him to visit hospitals all over North Korea during the year and a half he was there. He came to Washington at the same time as South Korea's President Kim Dae Jung because he opposes Kim's policy toward North Korea, and he wants Americans to understand why it is wrong. He says that the rulers of North Korea, who are now getting large gifts of food from abroad to alleviate the suffering of their people, are using it to feed the privileged class in Pyongyang and the army that enables them to hold on to power. The ordinary people outside of Pyongyang are starving to death. He says that Kim Dae Jung is so determined to pursue his opening to North Korea that won him the Nobel Peace Prize last year that he has been keeping the South Korean media from reporting what refugees say about the horrible conditions that prevail in the North.
DR. VOLLERTSEN WANTS TO SEE NORTH KOREA OPEN UP AND ADOPT ECONOMIC REFORMS, but he says aid must be contingent on human rights reforms. He believes that there are influential people in the North Korean government who want change. This means that the situation is not utterly hopeless. He thinks Kim Dae Jung's policy of giving aid with no strings attached to induce needed reforms will be counterproductive. He says conditions in North Korea outside of Pyongyang are intolerable. Hospitals have no medicine, no equipment, no electricity, no heat, and the temperature in the winter is far below freezing. He showed us photos he had taken of the pathetic, sad-eyed starving children.
WHILE HIS PASSPORT ALLOWED HIM TO GO WHERE NO OTHER FOREIGNERS WERE PERMITTED, he never saw the prison camps, where torture is routine. Last November, he came across the body of a young soldier who had been tortured to death. He decided he had to act. He composed a stinging criticism of the regime's crimes against humanity and distributed it to some German reporters and a visiting U.S. congressman. The government declared him to be a public enemy and expelled him at the end of the year, but it has not silenced him. He has written a petition calling for an international court to prosecute Kim Jong-II for his many crimes against the Korean people, ranging from blowing up a South Korean airliner, killing 115 people, to starving to death over two million North Koreans.
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