PFO 04-34B: September 21, 2004 Threatening Gestures as Cries for Help? Questioning an Overly Fixed Image of North Koreaby Lutz DrescherCONTENTS I. Introduction II. Essay by Lutz Drescher III. Nautilus Invites Your Responses I. Introduction This is an essay by Lutz Drescher. Drescher, lived as an ecumenical worker in the ROK from 1987 to 1995. […]

The following is an excerpt from the annual report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom dealing with religion in the DPRK. The report states “there is no evidence that religious freedom conditions have improved in the past year. The Commission continues to recommend that North Korea be designated a “country of particular concern,” or CPC, which the State Department has done since 2001.”

The following is an essay by Lutz Drescher. Drescher, lived as an ecumenical worker in the ROK from 1987 to 1995. Since 2001, he works for the Association of Churches and Missions in Southwest Germany (EMS) as liaison secretary for East Asia. He has participated in numerous meetings with representatives of the North Korean Christian Federation. He coordinated the first official Visit of an EKD (Evangelical Church Germany) delegation to the DPRK in May 2002. The essay states “there is thus freedom of religion, and yet it is a restricted freedom insofar as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is not a democratic country with individual rights of liberty in the Western sense. One can say that the members of the church in North Korea live out their faith under particularly harsh conditions. For precisely this reason, they depend on our intercessions and visits.”

The following is a paper by Robert J. Einhorn, Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and formerly Assistant Secretary of State for Nonproliferation in 1999 to August 2001. Einhorn writes: “if the North Koreans have decided they must have a substantial nuclear weapons capability whatever we may do (hardly a remote possibility), they would likely reject a reasonable offer. In that event, the next U.S. administration would have little choice but to turn to a longer-term strategy of pressure, containment, and eventual rollback. But having made a proposal that North Korea’s neighbors considered fair and balanced, we would be in a stronger position to gain multilateral support for that strategy.”