The Right To Die

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ANALYSIS & FEATURE

TUESDAY JULY 21, 2009

Could Korea evolve the ethics of death? More balanced view on euthanasia possible when religion does not interfere in politics By Chris Williams

Three sad deaths last week resurrected the muddled arguments about the right to die in Britain. Meanwhile the Korean courts are addressing the question progressively. On Thursday, the world’s oldest man, Henry Allingham, died peacefully aged 113. He attributed his long life to, “cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women.” He clearly enjoyed his long life to the full, and he remained well and active until the last few months. Last year he published his autobiography. The introduction was by Prince Charles, who called him “one of our nation’s historic treasures.” As we watched the 91st birthday celebrations of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, it is hard not to conclude that life should always be sustained, never terminated. He became president when aged 76. Doubtless during the 27 years of his harsh imprisonment he considered suicide. But not everyone enjoys the robust health of Mandela and Allingham. Last week, the renowned orchestral conductor Sir Edward Downs, and his wife Joan, had traveled to Switzerland to voluntarily end their lives at the clinic, “Dignitas.” They were painfully ill, and assisting death in Britain is illegal. At 85, Downs was almost blind and deaf, a cruel torture for a musician. His wife was terminally ill with cancer. After 54 years of marriage, they thought life without one another seemed intolerable. At Dignitas with family, they held hands, sipped a clear liquid and died peacefully a few minutes later. Like 117 other distressed British people, Downs and his wife had to go to Switzerland to arrange a dignified end to their lives, because the British government has been muddled and cowardly in clarifying the law about assisting death. The Director of Public Prosecutions even refused to confirm whether a friend or family accompanying someone to Dignitas would be charged with unlawful killing. Downs studied music at Birmingham University. He had left school at 14, worked for the gas board, and then secretly got a music scholarship. He played the violin, but also learned the French horn. A friend of mine, Bobs Woodhead, who is very full of life at age 80, tells how her father, who was registrar at the university, gave Downs permission to do extra fire watch duties during wartime bombing raids. He was happy to sit on the roof of a building, every night if possible. But everyone knew he had another motive. There he could practice his horn

Chris Williams ● Chris

Williams is based at the Center for International Education and Research, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.

● He

can be reached at [email protected]

undisturbed. Downs was obviously a man of creative thinking, and determination. And this persisted to the end, when his trip to Dignitas highlighted the lack of leadership from our politicians. On the day he left the United Kingdom, another muddled attempt to clarify the law had failed. The first issue here is not about the right to die. It is about the responsibility of any government to clarify and evolve its laws. This is especially necessary in a common law system as in England, where the courts can make up the law if there are no clear rules. Why should distressed families have to risk imprisonment because it is impossible to guess what a judge might think? In contrast, two months ago the Korean courts took a progressive step towards confirming that life should not always be prolonged, if it damaged “human dignity.” The Supreme Court upheld the decision of a lower court, which supported the wishes of a family to switch

off the life support system of a brain-dead man, at the Severance Hospital. Passive euthanasia by stopping a life support system is one step away from active euthanasia in the form of assisted suicide. But, as with so much else in Korea, this could quickly evolve. Perhaps soon, Korea might have a clear law like Switzerland. But why is Britain, which boasts about its long democratic and justice systems, so backward about this issue? One explanation stems from a world-beating statistic. The average age of members in the British House of Lords is 69. This must give rise to a less than average corporate view of the ethics of death. Also, among the Lords are a disproportionately high number of religious leaders, including 26 Bishops. Britain has always had muddled laws and strange attitudes towards death. It is even still illegal to die in the parliament buildings. Political interpretations of religion do not help. In Medieval times the body of some-

one who committed suicide was buried at a crossroads with a stake driven through the chest, as one would do to a vampire. There is a British joke that is punishable by death sentence. Not long ago it was true. In the 1860s, reports told of a messy attempt to hang a man who had been saved after he failed to die from cutting his own throat. Until 1961, attempted suicide could be punished by a prison sentence in Britain, and in 1969 a boy was whipped for trying to take his own life on the Isle of Man. But as with much in British law, we must look beyond the obvious facts to find a greater motive. Not only could those who attempted suicide be executed and imprisoned in Britain, but the King, later government, could confiscate all their property. Suicide highlights contradictions in religious ethics. How can Islam, Judaism and Christianity oppose suicide but respect martyrdom, which persists in modern form through

suicide bombing? The Easter story tells how Jesus engaged in assisted suicide. In the 5th century, a sect of Christian martyrs, the Donatists, were so troublesome that they were declared heretics. For heresy, the punishment was, death. Like the restrictions now put on women in countries such as Afghanistan and Iran, the religious view of suicide seems more related to controlling and maintaining religious power through fear and punishment, than reason, logic or human wellbeing. But attitudes can evolve in unpredictable ways. In 2004, a true Spanish film, “Mar Adentro” (The Sea Inside), about the fight for assisted suicide by a sailor Ramon Sampedro, opened. The first night was attended by Prime Minister Zapatero and most of the cabinet. The Spanish were considering following The Netherlands and Belgium, to legalize euthanasia. The Catholic Church opposed the idea. By 2008, draft legislation was

ready, and the Health Minister, Bernat Soria put the obvious argument, “The owner of your body is you.” Anyone who is lost for words when trying to explain death to a child, or to someone who is bereaved, might use a line from this film. When asked what happens after death, I remember that Sampedro replied with the simple truth that religions must deny to preserve the logic of their dogma — “When you die, you are the same as you were before you were born.” Perhaps without religion interfering in politics, Korea will achieve a more balanced view. Remember that during the Joseon era, high class women would carry a small knife (“eunjangdo”) hidden in their robes, to take their own life if rape was inevitable. The knife was small to show that it was for suicide, not defense. When former President Roh Moo-hyun died, Koreans did not question his right to end his own life, but why he felt forced to do this. The moral questions should

not concern whether suicide is good or bad, but why it might happen and how. Religious perspectives usually want us only to consider the first question, because answering the second reveals inconvenient theological truths. The arguments for and against passive and active euthanasia are evolving. But in the meantime perhaps A.H. Clough provides the best advice in his poetic parody of a Biblical commandment — “Thou shalt not kill but need not strive, officiously, to keep alive.” Last May, the “Death with Dignity Act” made Washington the second American state after Oregon, to legalize assisted death. A woman with pancreatic cancer became the first to benefit. In a week when we learn that Kim Jong-il probably has pancreatic cancer, this raises curious questions. How does North Korean law view assisted death? Is it possible that if Kim wanted to die with dignity, he would need to travel to America, or perhaps even to Seoul?

World disregards N.K. labor camps By Blaine Harden Washington Post Service

Images and accounts of the North Korean gulag become sharper, more harrowing and more accessible with each passing year. A distillation of testimony from survivors and former guards, newly published by the Korean Bar Association, details the daily lives of 200,000 political prisoners estimated to be in the camps: Eating a diet of mostly corn and salt, they lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken and, as they age, they hunch over at the waist. Most work 12- to 15-hour days until they die of malnutrition-related illnesses, usually around the age of 50. Allowed just one set of clothes, they live and die in rags, without soap, socks, underclothes or sanitary napkins. The camps have never been visited by outsiders, so these accounts cannot be independently verified. But high-resolution satellite photographs, now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, reveal vast labor camps in the mountains of North Korea. The photographs corroborate survivors’ stories, showing entrances to mines where former prisoners said they worked as slaves, in-camp detention centers where former guards said uncooperative pris-

oners were tortured to death and parade grounds where former prisoners said they were forced to watch executions. Guard towers and electrified fences surround the camps, photographs show. “We have this system of slavery right under our nose,” said An Myeong Chul, a camp guard who defected to South Korea. “Human rights groups can’t stop it. South Korea can’t stop it. The United States will have to take up this issue at the negotiating table.” But the camps have not been discussed in meetings between U.S. diplomats and North Korean officials. By exploding nuclear bombs, launching missiles and cultivating a reputation for hair-trigger belligerence, the government of Kim Jong-il has created a permanent security flash point on the Korean Peninsula — and effectively shoved the issue of human rights off the negotiating table. “Talking to them about the camps is something that has not been possible,” said David Straub, a senior official in the State Department’s office of Korean affairs during the Bush and Clinton years. There have been no such meetings since President Obama took office. “They go nuts when you talk about it,” said Straub, who is now associate director of Korean

studies at Stanford University. Nor have the camps become much of an issue for the American public, even though annotated images of them can be quickly called up on Google Earth and even though they have existed for half a century, 12 times as long as the Nazi concentration camps and twice as long as the Soviet Gulag. Although precise numbers are impossible to obtain, Western governments and human groups estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have died in the North Korean camps. North Korea officially says the camps do not exist. It restricts movements of the few foreigners it allows into the country and severely punishes those who sneak in. U.S. reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee were sentenced last month to 12 years of hard labor, after being convicted in a closed trial on charges of entering the country illegally. North Korea’s gulag also lacks the bright light of celebrity attention. No high-profile, internationally recognized figure has emerged to coax Americans into understanding or investing emotionally in the issue, said Suzanne Scholte, a Washingtonbased activist who brings camp survivors to the United States for speeches and marches. “Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere,

Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney,” she said. “North Koreans have no one like that.” Before guards shoot prisoners who have tried to escape, they turn each execution into a teachable moment, according to interviews with five North Koreans who said they have witnessed such killings. Prisoners older than 16 are required to attend, and they are forced to stand as close as 15 feet to the condemned, according to the interviews. A prison official usually gives a lecture, explaining how the Dear Leader, as Kim Jong-il is known, had offered a “chance at redemption” through hard labor. The condemned are hooded, and their mouths are stuffed with pebbles. Three guards fire three times each, as onlookers see blood spray and bodies crumple, those interviewed said. “We almost experience the executions ourselves,” said Jung Gwang-il, 47, adding that he witnessed two executions as an inmate at Camp 15. After three years there, Jung said, he was allowed to leave in 2003. He fled to China and now lives in Seoul. Like several former prisoners, Jung said the most arduous part of his imprisonment was his precamp interrogation at the hands

A photo released by Korean Central News Agency on July 18 shows Kim Jong-il (first from left), top leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, inspecting Unit 597 of the Navy of the Korean Xinhua-Yonhap News People’s Army at an undisclosed location.

of the Bowibu, the National Security Agency. After eight years in a government office that handled trade with China, a fellow worker accused him of being a South Korean agent. “They wanted me to admit to being a spy,” Jung said. “They

knocked out my front teeth with a baseball bat. They fractured my skull a couple of times. I was not a spy, but I admitted to being a spy after nine months of torture.” When he was arrested, Jung said, he weighed 167 pounds.

When his interrogation was finished, he said, he weighed 80 pounds. “When I finally got to the camp, I actually gained weight,” said Jung, who worked summers in cornfields and spent winters in the mountains felling trees.