“Human rights are not secondary to the goal of unification; they are the foundation upon which any lasting unification must be built,” Lee Seo-hyun, a North Korean defector and a member of the Global Advisory Council at the McCain Institute, said in her recorded speech during the forum’s opening session.

“Without addressing the suffering of those in North Korea, we cannot move forward with a genuine or sustainable plan for peace.”

Under the theme “Korean Dream: Vision and Pathway towards a Free and Unified Korea,” the forum focused discussion around Global Peace Foundation founder and chairman Hyun Jin Preston Moon’s vision for unification, known as the Korean Dream, as a platform for discussion.

Korean Dream is centered on creating a unified Korea based on the historical Korean motto hongik ingan — which broadly means “for the benefit of all humankind” — and the spirit of the March 1st Independence Movement, which fought for independence during the Japanese occupation of 1910-1945.

According to this idea, governments should secure human rights, freedom and dignity for its citizens, recognizing that they come from a divine source and not the state. Moon cited the American Declaration of Independence as the clearest expression of this idea.

And Moon said his Korean Dream, if adopted by all, could bring “all the disparate factions of Koreans together.”

“That was my dream. That was my belief. That was my conviction,” he said Friday.

He suggested that there is now a vacuum of ideology in North Korea in the wake of its leader, Kim Jong Un, early this year announcing that unification was no longer North Korea’s goal and South Korea was now the “principal enemy.”

He said Kim’s abandonment of the stated goal of his father, Kim Jong Il, and grandfather, North Korean founder Kim Il Song, is an admission “that he has already lost.”

The abandonment of unification, which he described as the “light at the end of the tunnel” for which North Koreans endured the tyranny they lived under, was removing their final hope for the future.

“Who is carrying the torch of those aspirations, staying true to our 5,000-year history and the destiny of the Korean people? Who?” he asked. “All of you that are part of this great, significant, historical movement to bring about the peaceful unification of the Korean homeland.”

Suzanne Scholte, chairman of the North Korea Freedom Coalition and an activist for North Korean human rights, told the forum that the late Hwang Jang-yop, the highest-ranking North Korean to defect to South Korea, had told her “there was one Achilles’ heel of the Kim regime: human rights.”

But the governments of the United States and South Korea had instead for decades focused narrowly on the issue of denuclearization.

She said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s claim that his nuclear arsenal is to defend his people against the United States was a lie — perpetuated by the international community through their “failure to affirm that all the United States has ever desired from North Koreans was to have the same rights and freedom that those born south of the DMZ enjoy.”

The Demilitarized Zone is the heavily fortified border that separates the two Koreas.

Robert Joseph — senior scholar at the National Institute for Public Policy and former under secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security during the U.S. administration of President George W. Bush — criticized the policies governments had adopted over the past decades. He said that they were an “amoral approach” that had also failed since they had resulted in the Kim regime greatly expanding its nuclear capabilities and tightening its oppressive control of its people.

He acknowledged that a human rights approach to North Korean policy was “no silver bullet,” but considered it had the best prospect of success if pursued earnestly.

“Paying lip service to human rights is not enough,” he said. “In fact, in a rather cynical way, it only provides cover for failing to take the difficult but necessary actions that would have a real effect on achieving the goal of the Korea dream that we all share.”

He continued that a human rights-first policy must include the involvement of North Koreans, with the “infusion of information into the country” being crucial to affect change.

This notion of continuing to inundate North Korea with outside information — from K-pop to news — was repeatedly mentioned by speakers during the day’s sessions.

The information is smuggled in via thumb drives that, once in country, are copied over and over, via the loudspeaker propaganda campaign from the South’s side of the DMZ, and via those in North Korea with Chinese cellphones that have access to the Internet. These are some of the ways those in the isolated country learn about the outside world, speakers said.

Joseph explained that with the “principle agent” of change for North Korea being its people, the information from the outside world is needed to empower them, especially since “the regime is simply terrified of the consequences of allowing its own people to know the truth.”

He said this information should focus on three areas: the North Koreans’ “abysmal” human rights situation, the corruption of the Kim family and news of the outside world.

The policy experts and activists who spoke during the plenary session stressed that the Kim regime’s oppression of its citizens’ human rights was a tool to its survival, one it wields when threatened.

The experts pointed to the escalating crackdown on North Koreans consuming South Korean entertainment as clear evidence of this.

Disclaimer: Moon is the chairman of UCI, which owns UPI’s parent company.