Who Is the Main Culprit of Racial and Cultural Obliteration?

 2022.7.5.

http://www.mfa.gov.kp/view/article/15342

At the recent 50th Session of the UN Human Rights Council, there has been a debate over the report drafted by the special rapporteur on violence against women.

At the session, some countries pointed out that human rights violation against the indigenous women and girls is going rampant in the Western countries such as the U.S., Canada and Australia, and called for the attention of UNHCR to this issue.

Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and first and second clause of Article 22 of United Nations Declaration of Rights for Indigenous People stipulate that everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, national or social origin, and states shall take measures to ensure that indigenous women and children enjoy the full protection and guarantees against all forms of violence and discrimination.

Racial and cultural obliteration against indigenous people have been perpetrated for centuries under the strong support and tacit approval of the governments of the Western countries, self-proclaimed advanced states of human rights.

As part of cultural assimilation policy towards indigenous people, the U.S. established 350-odd boarding schools for native Americans in the secluded regions between 19th and 20th century. The U.S. detained a large number of the native children to forcefully separate them from their parents, families and regional societies before forcing them into toilsome labor.

In Australia, too, more than 100,000 aboriginal children, including girls, were reduced to slaves in the past period. They are still falling victim to grave human rights violation by the racial discrimination policy and inequity in juridical execution pursued by their government.

As we enter this year, the aboriginal people, 3.3% of the total population, take 29% of the total detainees due to the selective and prejudiced execution of the law by the police. This staggering fact is just the tip of the iceberg of the serious human rights issue this country is faced with.

Last year, more than 1,200 remains of the children were found in various parts of Canada including a graveyard of 200-odd remains of indigenous Canadian children. Some time ago, 93 remains of the children were found at the site of the boarding school for indigenous people which was run in the last century, thus drawing a great concern from the international society.

This is not all.

In the last century, Japan occupied Korea by force for 40-odd years and ran amuck to annihilate the Korean nation. With a gangster-like logic that “Koreans should obey the Japanese law or die”, it turned all the Koreans into slaves, forced them to change their names into Japanese ones, abducted and forcibly drafted countless Korean women to reduce them to sexual slaves of the Japanese imperial army.

Notwithstanding these facts, the successive governments of Japan, far from admitting, apologizing and compensating for the past super-class crime against humanity, have shirked their responsibilities with lame excuses and history distortion.

Moreover, it is applying a discriminatory policy of not ensuring the rights of the Korean residents in Japan- the immediate victims of the Japanese colonial rule and its descendants- in all fields of the social life including education and healthcare.

The institutional and systematic obliteration of race and culture perpetrated by the U.S. and the Western countries have continued for centuries and generations. Today, it has developed into all sorts of variants to generate racial, national and religious conflicts and increase the instability in the world.

The above facts prove that these countries are the main culprits of racial and cultural obliteration, and that the respect for human rights and observance of human rights conventions touted by them are no more than hypocrisy.

The international society should thoroughly investigate all the inhumane crimes committed by the U.S. and the Western countries in the past and the present, and bring them before the court of justice.

 

Kim In Guk

Researcher of Korean Association for Human Rights Studies