00:00 "Travis King fled racism and abuse in America."
00:04 That was North Korea's claim in a state media report that came after nearly a month of silence
00:10 since the U.S. soldier disappeared over the border.
00:15 The statement throws a spotlight on North Korea's long and complicated history of citing
00:21 U.S. racism as a way to push back on Washington's criticism of the North's human rights abuses.
00:28 Let's take a closer look.
00:30 In 1969, Pyongyang hosted American author and activist Eldridge Cleaver, leader of the
00:36 Black Panther Party.
00:38 Cleaver wrote that North Korea and its great leader had, quote, "heightened our consciousness
00:42 to a level that makes us equal to the task of dealing with our number one enemy, the
00:48 U.S. imperialist aggressors."
00:49 In 2018, Pyongyang released a white paper on human rights violations in the U.S. where
00:57 it accused Donald Trump's administration of aggravating the racial discrimination and
01:02 misanthropy, citing white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
01:11 During the protests after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, North Korean officials
01:16 cited extreme racists in America and criticized authorities' response to the protests.
01:24 But North Korean state media has its own history of issuing racially charged statements.
01:30 In 2014, the state news agency published a report using a racially offensive term to
01:36 describe then U.S. President Barack Obama.
01:39 Threats will get North Korea nothing.
01:43 That same year, a landmark U.N. report on North Korean human rights concluded that the
01:48 country's security chiefs and possibly leader Kim Jong-un himself should face justice for
01:54 overseeing a state-controlled system of Nazi-style atrocities.
02:00 That report included allegations that North Korea conducts forced abortions on women suspected
02:05 to have been impregnated by men in China, driven by an underlying belief in a pure Korean
02:11 race to which mixed-race children are considered a contamination of its pureness.
02:17 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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