Sick Day Post: Refugee Update; More Bad News for the Alliance; Politics; Are Independent Businessmen Running North Korea’s Counterfeiting Racket?
My advice to everyone who values his health: do not have children. I think I’ve been sick now for a whole month, courtesy of the adorable little biohazards at my son’s preschool. To save time, I put everything into one post (HT to LiNK for most of these).
South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission, excoriated here and elsewhere for dabbling in petty minutiae while Kim Jong Il sent two million of his citizens to mass graves, is promising to send North Korea a sternly worded letter:
The announcement came after a public outcry against the presidential advisory panel for remaining silent on human rights issues in Korea while becoming involved in highly contentious issues such as the National Security Law and labor rights for nonregular workers. The action plan said if the human rights watchdog rules that a case under investigation reveals human rights abuse, it will recommend the South Korean government convey a demand for compensation to Pyongyang.
Recently, four returned abductees to North Korea filed a complaint with the commission to demand the Pyongyang government compensate them $100 million
each.
That, I’d like to see. Maybe the fines could be deducted from the North Korean Air Force Runway Reconstruction Fund.
North Korean refugees are finding shelter, and in some cases, asylum, in Belgium, France, and elsewhere in Europe.
WASHINGTON–Six North Korean defectors have now been accepted as refugees by the Belgian government, and an unknown number is believed to have reached France, after a marathon journey spanning several years and tens of thousands of
miles.“It was hard to survive in North Korea,” a 22-year-old defector surnamed Kim, who arrived in February 2005, told RFA. “My father passed away, leaving me no relatives. So I was afraid I would die.
Kim said he had no particular plan to come to Belgium but joined a human-smuggling group that was going there.
It certainly adds fuel to charges that the U.S. stand on North Korean refugees falls substantially and hypocritically short of our statutory aspirations. Nations as far afield as Belgium are taking them in, but our consulates in Beijing, Shanghai, and Saigon continue to lock them out.
There is an ironic pattern in U.S.-South Korean disagreements on refugee policy, one that emerges every time the United States criticizes the South’s stand on human rights in the North. The Koreans respond by pointing out (accurately) that they’re at least taking in some refugees, and stating (accurately but disingenuously) that that the United States’s own failure to take in refugees makes its own stance hypocritical.
Why disingenuous? Because the primary reason U.S. embassies aren’t taking in those refugees is political sensitivities in the region, including the South Korean government’s own urging that we not take any refugees in for fear of offending or destabilizing the North.
It’s a situation that can’t last. Sooner or later, the State Department will bend to the law and begin “facilitating the submission” of asylum applications at our embassies abroad, as 22 U.S.C. sec. 7843 requires. Congress won’t stand for a federal executive agency flouting the law or dragging its feet on compliance with it. Ditto the NKHRA provision on providing radios and increasing broadcasting hours, although some of those provisions are unlikely to go public.
Instead, President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea, who was a human-rights lawyer before entering elective politics, has been strangely subdued on this question. Senior officials of his government have argued that it is better to be “prudent” than to provoke the North Koreans with criticism. Some have demanded that the American ambassador be recalled.In a press conference with Bush during his visit to South Korea in November, Roh asserted in a convoluted argument that his approach on the North Korean human-rights issue was similar to that of America’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, in freeing the slaves during the Civil War: “President Lincoln’s first priority was unity among the states of America.”The dispute over how to handle this issue comes against a backdrop of rising anti-Americanism in Korea and a nascent anti-Korean backlash in the United States. In particular, Washington and Seoul disagree over how to negotiate with Pyongyang on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. The Americans take a hard line while the South Koreans advocate “flexibility.”
[R]elations between the U.S. and South Korea have deteriorated so far that some Korea specialists have begun privately to speculate that the alliance will be diluted or possibly dissolved in five to eight years.
High-ranking government officials in a separate briefing described the embassy release as “an overstatement. They homed in on the word “urged” to describe what the Treasury investigators did in the meeting on Monday, saying it was used in such as way as to “imply we are not doing something that we needed to do. The officials said they protested to the embassy “and received a response that met our expectations. They said they had yet to hear from the Treasury Department.
The U.S. Embassy is sticking to its story. And given that election season is starting, President Roh wasted no time in rushing out before the cameras to defy the Yankee oppressor:
“The Korean government does not agree with some opinions in the U.S. that apparently want to take issue with and pressure the North Korean regime, sometimes hoping for its collapse,” the president said in his traditional New Year’s press conference. “If the US government attempts to resolve the problem that way, there will be friction and disagreements between Seoul and Washington.
Meaning Roh hopes this noxious regime won’t collapse, with all that implies for the North Korean people. And as I predicted here just days ago, Roh is back to hum-hawwing doubts and ambivalence about North Korean counterfeiting. In fact, Seoul is making the rather ridiculous suggestion that any North Korean counterfeiting could well be the doings of “independent” North Korean businessmen (a double oxymoron). Why, I ask, does Roh stubbornly refuse to adopt such an obvious compromise, for peace’s sake?
Other interesting political points in the article:
- Roh admits that he’ll raise taxes to achieve a more equal wealth distribution.
- Roh opposes reuniting the ruling Uri Party with the former Millenium Democratic Party, now the Democratic Party, no doubt because its members have no use for Roh and could tip the balance against him in the nomination / succession contest.