Norbert Vollertsen

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Norbert Vollertsen (born February 10, 1958 in Düsseldorf ) is a German doctor and human rights activist in North Korea who received a North Korean Friendship Medal.

Life

Vollertsen studied medicine and took his last exam in 1985 before working as an emergency doctor in the Maldives for a year and a half . From 1989 the doctor of pediatricians lived with his wife in Göttingen , with whom he had four sons. He protested against what in his opinion was too one-sided medicine that was too heavy on apparatus and pharmaceuticals and that was not orientated enough towards people and argued with the health authorities and the medical associations. In 1998 Vollertsen was sentenced to a fine of 3,000 marks in Göttingen for handling a blank gun and a syringe in a courtroom to protest against German health policy. After his marriage fell apart, he saw the film Patch Adams in 1999 and closed his practice the next day to join the German emergency medical committee Cap Anamur .

Doctor in North Korea

Vollertsen joined the association Cap Anamur - German emergency doctors in order to work abroad for a while. He was given the choice between North Korea and South Sudan . Since he couldn't find a travel guide about North Korea anywhere, he decided on North Korea in 1999. He worked there for 18 months and kept a diary .

On the first day after his arrival, he underwent the first operation in North Korea in a hospital in Sinwon , a city not far from the port city of Haeju : an appendix operation without any kind of anesthesia . The hospital had to operate with daylight and there was a lack of medication and hygiene .

Shortly after his arrival in Haeju, a man was admitted to the hospital. Two-thirds of his skin was burned by a hot iron accident and his life was in acute danger. A transplant was organized for which 150 doctors and nurses donated a piece of her skin, including Vollertsen. Vollertsen gained some notoriety through coverage in the local North Korean media and was portrayed as a hero . A local television team reported when he donated skin a second time. Vollertsen was the first foreigner, together with Francois Large, to be awarded the medal of friendship and a VIP pass .

Thanks to the friendship medal that he has visibly wore since then, the VIP pass and his Korean language skills, he managed to get a North Korean driver's license. He was given his own car and was allowed to move around the country alone without an interpreter or official escort. Uniformed men did not ask for any further permits or documents, but gave him access to many places where no Westerner had been before. He witnessed malnutrition while party cadres let themselves be chauffeured through the country in new Mercedes-Benz cars. So he secretly photographed his patients and their dilapidated accommodations and did not stop at visiting the ten hospitals and three orphanages assigned to him . He saw broken beer bottles as drips. Antibiotics were not available. In the absence of medication and bandages, no major operations were performed.

On a business trip with a German nurse to Pukchang , 50 kilometers north of Pyongyang , he saw a man in his early 20s in uniform lying in the middle of the street and forced his driver to stop. Under the dead man's shirt he found scars on his neck and back. The nurse said that the man was tortured.

Human rights activist

After these experiences, he decided to do something contrary to the practice for personnel on humanitarian missions. He asked about the young soldier's injuries, but received no replies. However, his driver and translator then disappeared. He wrote a "Declaration of Humanitarian Principles" accusing the government of ill-treatment and torture and passed it on to German journalists and a member of the US Congress who was on a trip to North Korea.

Vollertsen used the visit of US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to North Korea in October 2000 to draw the attention of some international journalists to the hungry people who pour in on the outskirts of Pyongyang every day. He accused the regime of failing to distribute a significant part of the large international food aid to the poorest. No foreign organization is allowed to observe or monitor the distribution of their aid supplies in North Korea. No organization knows whether their relief supplies are being given to cadres or members of the army, or whether they are being sold abroad. Although Vollertsen knew about the medication and bandages that had been delivered, they were not available in the hospitals. Not even the International Committee of the Red Cross has access to the “institutions of reform” in which entire families are locked up if one of their members accuses the regime through a statement or action, such as, B. Escape to China appears dubious.

Vollertsen was criticized in the North Korean media for this and reported that his car had punctured tires and lack of brake fluid , which should have forced him to leave the country. On December 30, 2000 he was expelled and had to leave North Korea by train to China. From there Vollertsen traveled to the South Korean capital Seoul , where he started a campaign against the North Korean regime and for North Korean refugees whom he met in South Korea , China and Thailand . He was traveling with relief supplies to the Panmunjom demarcation line and wanted to give an impromptu speech about human rights, for which he was arrested. A demonstration in front of the Chinese embassy in Seoul was violently broken up by the South Korean police, in which he and the North Korean refugees were allegedly beaten.

He wanted to act against the North Korean regime and generate media attention with actions such as carrying small radios with balloons over the inner-Korean border or over the sea, but was arrested by the South Korean authorities because it was an unannounced demonstration.

He wanted to use the six-party talks and the Olympic Games in Beijing to generate more publicity about North Korea, which he compared to a concentration camp . He referred to Art. 45ff. of the North Korean Criminal Code . Vollertsen laments the lack of any freedom of speech, movement, press, belief, etc. Although the Christian church in Pyongyang allegedly has 3,000 active members and holds Sunday services every week, he reported that the chairs and benches had an unmistakable layer of dust. Vollertsen never saw any activity there on any Sunday. He accused Kim Jong-il , the late General Secretary of the North Korean Labor Party , of genocide .

After three years in Seoul, he reported that his family had been the target of death threats in Germany and that he was attacked by North Koreans during a demonstration in South Korea and not protected but beaten by the South Korean police present. During a visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to South Korea, US security guards are said to have beaten him when he tried to unroll a poster on March 21, 2005, with which he wanted to protest against hunger in North Korea.

From January to May 2005 Vollertsen worked as an emergency doctor in Banda Aceh , Indonesia , caring for the victims of the tsunami , but did not return to Germany but to South Korea with the other aid teams to take part in three further, unapproved political events. On June 4, 2005 he was expelled from South Korea for this reason.

In 2007 he provided medical care to refugees in Cambodia .

Litigation

After he had already been fined by a Göttingen court in 1998 for his political protests and he also had problems with the authorities in South Korea, the Göttingen Regional Court sentenced him to three years imprisonment on June 11, 2013 for repeatedly abusing a 13-year-old.

literature

  • Norbert Vollertsen: Inside North Korea, Diary of a mad place. Encounters Books 2004, ISBN 1-893554-87-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Past News. See last section: DPRK Friendship Medal awarded to Germans . In: kcna.co.jp. August 23, 1999, archived from the original on July 17, 2001 ; accessed on April 28, 2019 (English).
  2. What did you think, Mr. Vollertsen? Der Spiegel from April 8, 2002.
  3. Commentary by Young-Jin Choi: An elephant in a china shop: About the strange activities of Mr. Vollertsen in Korea , WG Peace Research .
  4. ^ Testimony of Mr. Norbert Vollertsen. (PDF; 42.2 KB) In: judiciary.senate.gov. July 21, 2002, accessed December 13, 2018 .
  5. German escape worker: North Korea is blackmailing the world . Interview on Deutschlandfunk on March 30, 2007.
  6. ^ Doctor has to be imprisoned for three years ( memento from June 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ). NDR from June 11, 2013.