Kofi Annan Calls on N. Korea to Account for Abductees
Well, it’s a start.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday said North Korea must be held to account for the suffering and rage of people it kidnapped and the anxiety of families who never discovered what happened to their loved ones. He called on the North to return every one of those it abducted in its bizarre campaign in the 1970s and 80s.
He also called on human rights and counterfeiting to be dealt with separately from, and (impliedly) after the nuke situation is resolved. The State Department is trying to resolve those issues separately, too, although the NK Human Rights Act requires the U.S. government to make human rights an issue in the talks. The U.S. position is that counterfeiting is an unrelated law enforcement issue that it will resolve now.
Annan, as you may recall, was last seen making himself conspicuously scarce during the Seoul Freedom House Conference. Overall, the U.N. has been a non-presence on NK human rights issues. This really doesn’t change that fact, although even this contributes to South Korea’s diplomatic isolation on the issue. The South Korean position is that individual nations should solve the issue through “quiet diplomacy,” and the less said publicly, the better.
Update:
The Joongang Ilbo has a different take on this:
With Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, an announced candidate to succeed him, at his side, Mr. Annan endorsed Seoul’s undivided focus on eliminating nuclear weapons in North Korea, saying it should have a “separate category and priority” than human rights and other issues.
The remarks were an indirect criticism of Washington’s policies on North Korean human rights issues and illicit trade by the communist regime. The U.S. government contends that weapons, rights and activities such as currency counterfeiting, although separate, are equally important and should be addressed simultaneously.
That’s more like what I’d expect from someone of Annan’s moral caliber. So is Annan endorsing Ban Ki-Moon as his successor?