One woman in Virginia has made it her mission to find people who have escaped North Korea’s totalitarian regime and can tell their story to inspire and liberate others.
Suzanne Scholte is president of Defense Forum Foundation. In a “labor of love,” she has been reaching out to North Korea defectors for over a decade, helping fund a small radio station run by these people in South Korea to broadcast news, truth, information and messages of hope to those living under the North Korean brutal dictator, Kim Jung Un.
In late April, she hosted her 14th annual North Korean Freedom Week to “prepare for the regime collapse and peaceful reunification of Korea” with North Korean defectors in Washington, D.C. Importantly, they start with a church service and then go to the Korean War Memorial where they lay a wreath, with great emotion, for the Americans who died making South Korea free.
“It’s very powerful because these are people brainwashed to hate us and now they know we were the good guys,” Scholte says in this exclusive video interview for The Daily Caller News Foundation.
This year, these defectors, who, like all North Koreans, were manipulated to hate Americans as “Yankee Imperialist Wolves,” desperately wanted to meet with President Donald Trump or his team.
They were unsuccessful.
“If Donald Trump would have met with these people, it would have sent a powerful signal to people in the regime that Donald Trump cared about the North Korean people,” at such a critical time of the escalation and focus on the nuclear issue, Scholte says in this interview filmed at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center in Washington, D.C.
Scholte considers one reason the Trump team did not open their doors was because some of the advisers worry about provoking China. The Trump administration, like many before it, is counting on China’s help to control North Korea.
These defectors, however, feel such a reliance is fraught with peril, since communist China is blocking progress in the UN of condemning or impeding North Korea. China cannot be trusted, in their opinion.
Scholte ran, unsuccessfully, for Congress in Virginia’s 11th Congressional District in 2014, getting 40 percent of the vote against the Democrat incumbent. Amongst numerous other awards for her important humanitarian work, Scholte received the highest award given to a non-Korean in 2013 by the Republic of Korea, the Sungnye Diplomatic Service Award.
The shortwave radio station run by North Korean defectors relies exclusively on private donations, allowing it to include Christian programming as part of its daily broadcast. Scholte seeks partners who, with $250, can sponsor a full hour of programming that provides vital information and news.
For more on Scholte, see her heart-felt tribute about the death of the American student, Otto Warmbier, see their Facebook page, and consider supporting the North Korea Free Radio program by donating to her organization.
Videographer Sean Moody is credited with the video work for this piece.
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