North Korea Imposes Harsher Penalties for Unauthorized Border Crossing

Although I recall hearing someone say recently that human rights would be an important part of the State Department’s negotiations with North Korea, I have yet to see any recent evidence that State’s masters of cerebellingus have applied their techniques to the task of lifting North Korea to a shallower level of hell. Somone had better tell Glyn Davies that a few more adjectives will have to be sacrificed for the cause:

North Korea has imposed stiffer punishments on those caught trying to flee the destitute state with the new measures coming into effect after reports surfaced that leader Kim Jong-il suffered a stroke, relief groups said.

The tougher penalties implemented in the past few months were designed to show the central government was well in control as questions were raised about leadership in Asia’s only communist dynasty in response to Kim’s suspected illness, they said.

“The penalties are getting stronger and they have increased after Kim Jong-il’s stroke,” said Tim Peters, the founder and director of Helping Hands Korea, a Christian aid group that helps North Koreans seek asylum.

The U.S. State Department said in a report earlier this year that North Korea controlled its population by shutting them off from the outside world, keeping them in fear through arbitrary and unlawful killings and running a network of political prisons to stamp out dissent. [….]

Another activist said his sources inside the state told him the stricter punishments went into full force in October, at about the same time the North stepped up its campaign to show that its “Dear Leader” was alive and fully in control.

“Now repatriated defectors are said to be facing immediate public trials while crowds, sometimes including family members, watch the scene,” said Kim Dae-sung of Free North Korea Radio.

“They get sentences of more than a year, a much longer term compared to the previous six-month sentence on average.” [Reuters, Jon Herskovitz and Kim Junghyun]

This report is actually relatively mild compared to recent reports that North Korea has expanded the use of public executions. Two groups, of 15 and 22 persons, respectively, were shot on the spot for crossing the border in the spring.

Anyone over 35 probably remembers when Reagan coined the term “constructive engagement” to oppose sanctions against South Africa, and how liberals recast that very term into a vile euphemism for enabling racism and oppression. Having lived in South Africa during the very time that apartheid was abolished one discriminatory law at a time, I would still posit that the worst quarters of Soweto were an earthly paradise compared to Hamhung, Chongjin, or Yodok.

Governments have been engaging North Korea in earnest for nearly a dozen years now, yet nothing constructive ever seems to come of it. As the lights go out in Kumgang and Kaesong, many in South Korea have arrived at a grim acknowledgement of that much, though “enlightenment” is probably still too strong a word. I question whether most of the diplomatic class in Washington is capable of learning it at all.

It may come closer to the truth to say that nothing we say will ever influence North Korea’s behavior. North Korea will only change when it has no other alternative, and to deny the regime alternatives we need the the means (which we have) and the will (which we don’t) to attach severe economic consequences to the regime’s deviations from civilization’s basic standards.