'Choco Pie' on table for campaign to address North Korean human rights problem

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) plans to give away free Choco Pies near the White House next week in a bid to enhance public awareness of the human rights conditions in the communist nation. The event will take place at Farragut Square on Wednesday, coinciding with the opening of two-day public hearings by a special panel of the U.N. Human Rights Council looking into the human rights abuses in the North. Choco Pies are chocolate-covered, marshmallow-filled snack cakes first sold by a South Korean company in 1974. North Korea watchers say the small pies have become a mind-changing tool for people in the tightly controlled society. Choco Pies enter the North mostly through the Kaesong Industrial Complex, where about 120 South Korean firms hire more than 50,000 North Korean workers. "Despite the regime's crackdown, small but resilient markets have since developed, fending off another famine. The smuggled South Korean Choco Pie has become the symbol of North Korea's black markets," said Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the HRNK, a Washington-based nonprofit group. He said the Choco Pie project is aimed at calling more public attention to his organization's activities to address the North Korean human rights problem and next week's hearings by the U.N. Commission of Inquiry. The Kim Jong-un regime continues to ban all freedoms in the nation and as many as 120,000 political prisoners remain in its gulags, Scarlatoiu said.