🔔 UPDATE: Lift the Ban on Christine Ahn's Travel to South Korea
Thank you to everyone who signed our petition demanding that the Yoon Suk Yeol government lift the ban on Christine Ahn's travel to South Korea! Since last week, we've collected over a thousand signatures and counting from prominent activists, academics, cultural workers, diplomats, and more.
Despite many inquiries, Christine, a longtime Korean American peace activist and WCDMZ's Founder and Co-Director, still has not received any official response or explanation from South Korean officials on why she was recently denied entry to South Korea.
We are continuing to gather signatures to keep pressuring the South Korean government to overturn the ban on Christine. A free press is crucial to prevent democratic backsliding, and we appreciate everyone who has covered this story, including in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Korean Quarterly, Japan Forward, Hyperallergic, and Hankyoreh.
🔗 Sign and share the petition at bit.ly/liftingtheban!
On October 30, 2024, Christine Ahn, Women Cross DMZ Founder and Co-Director, was barred from boarding an Asiana Airlines flight from Honolulu to the Republic of Korea. Ahn was on her way to deliver the key note address at the International Youth Peace Forum in Gyeonggi Province, set to be hosted by the provincial government on November 2, 2024. The Asiana agent informed Ahn that, after checking with R.O.K. immigration authorities, they were not authorized to provide Ahn with a boarding pass. Ahn was told that the R.O.K. official provided no explanation, only that Ahn was denied entry into South Korea.
Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming U.S. presidential elections, it is clear we are in a time of rising global authoritarianism. The international community must push back against authoritarian governments that are repressing and violating the human rights of peace activists.
✍️ Sign on to lift this ban on Christine Ahn’s travel at bit.ly/liftingtheban or the link in bio! Read the full press release in English and Korean also at the link in bio.
Our Co-Director Cathi Choi writes about the need for U.S. presidential candidates Harris and Trump to develop a new approach to North Korea in the National Interest. At their first debate, Trump boasted that North Korea is “afraid” of him, while Harris accused Trump of exchanging “love letters” with Kim Jong-un. Both failed to address how they will actually avert nuclear war in Korea. U.S. policy needs a new approach: a peace agreement now.
The majority of people in the U.S. still support diplomatically engaging with North Korea to reduce tensions and avoid military confrontation. Engagement is not “cozying up” to North Korea; rather, it is the prerequisite for peaceful coexistence and averting nuclear war. No amount of militarized escalation or sanctions will resolve the security crisis on the Korean Peninsula. We must instead maximize our efforts for diplomacy.
In our third Intergenerational Healing and Learning gathering, author and professor Grace M. Cho and journalist and writer Iris Yi Youn Kim presented their work and discussed how memoir can act as a vessel for unpacking and healing intergenerational trauma, especially for members of the Korean diaspora. In her interview with MOLD, Grace explained that many in the Korean diaspora live under the conditions of “enforced forgetting.” In gathering, we seek to remember and reclaim our histories.
Grace M. Cho’s work sits at the crossroads of creative nonfiction and interdisciplinary scholarship, exploring the ways in which residues of state violence and historical trauma permeate the intimate spaces of the here and now. As a sociologist, she approaches storytelling as an opportunity to broaden the lens through which readers see personal experience. In her memoir, Tastes Like War, Cho chronicles her mother’s struggle with schizophrenia and how her mother’s traumas from the war may have contributed to her mental illness. Iris is currently a 2024 NBCU Academy Storyteller. She was part of the 30 Under 30 Cohort that attended the 2023 Korea Peace Action national mobilization, and is currently working on a collection of essays about the reverberations of immigration and assimilation within Korean American communities.
Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award in adult nonfiction. Her first book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in The Nation, Catapult, The New Inquiry, Poem Memoir Story, Contexts, Gastronomica, Feminist Studies, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.
Iris (Yi Youn) Kim is a 2024 NBCU Academy Storyteller. She is also a 2022 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, a 2022 USC Center for Public Diplomacy U.S.-South Korea Creative NextGen Fellow, and a 2023 Gold House Journalism Futures Accelerator Participant. Her work was anthologized in Woodhall Press’ “Nonwhite and Woman” in September 2022. Iris was part of the 30 Under 30 Cohort that attended the 2023 Korea Peace Action national mobilization. She is currently working on a collection of essays about the reverberations of immigration and assimilation within Korean American communities.
