Representatives of foreign missions, international NGO’s, academia and the press attended a briefing given by HHK_Catacombs’ founder Tim Peters and hosted by the Database for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB). Peters provided a comprehensive overview his NGO’s ‘asymmetric humanitarian initiatives’ to members of the EU delegation, the French Embassy, the Australian Embassy, the German Embassy, the Swedish Embassy, the Norwegian Embassy, the Finnish Embassy, the Sri Lankan Embassy, as well as participants from the Hanns Seidel Foundation, the Korea Hana Foundation, North Korea Human Rights Foundation, the Wall Street Journal, and professors from Yonsei University and Sungshin Women’s University. The event was kindly hosted by the French Embassy.
Stressing the growing challenges to NGO’s within the tense security environment on the Korean Peninsula as well as on the Sino-DPRK border, Peters used four specific examples from his own NGO project strategies to stress the critical importance of adopting unconventional approaches to enable continued assistance to North Koreans in crisis under current conditions. Now in the 21st year of leading HHK’s philanthropic and humanitarian activities, Peters outlined ongoing innovation and unconventional approaches to his organization’s food, medicine and clothing project, evacuation of North Korean refugees along the so-called ‘underground railroad,’ protection and foster care for orphaned children in China who’ve lost their North Korean refugee mothers to forced repatriation by Chinese officials, as well as non-traditional advocacy and awareness-raising activities on a global scale. (Some additional details are available upon request to tapkorea@gmail.com)