New Reports Highlight Failure of U.N., Ban Ki Moon to Address North Korean, Chinese Atrocities
A series of new reports on (the absence of) human rights in North Korea will not, by itself, change much, but they signify that for now, South Korea has stopped ignoring the issue. They may also complicate the State Department’s preferred course of doing the same.
On the 20th, Human Rights Watch released its 2010 “World Report,” which brings together a review of all the most important issues in the field of international human rights during 2009. As usual, North Korea is a key target for criticism as one of the world’s worst human rights abusers.
Among the most dubious plaudits North Korea receives in this year’s report is that of being one of just three nations, the others being Eritrea and Turkmenistan, which are “so oppressive that no domestic human rights movement can exist openly,” primarily because, “No one dares. [Daily NK, Chris Green]
Meaning that we ought to be helping North Koreans establish a clandestine opposition network. How? By supplying it with information, money, medicine, and food for distribution via cross-border smuggling and coastal drops. If the government denies the people their essential needs, a clandestine opposition movement should step up to provide them. Put differently, when a government becomes destructive of these ends — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — it is the right of the people to alter, or to abolish it.
HRW, whose work on North Korea is spearheaded by the able and forthright Kay Seok, notes a litany of problems that will sound familiar to OFK regulars: the suppression of all hints of thoughtcrime or a free press, the lack of “a functioning civil society,” zero religious freedom, and “the preponderance of arbitrary arrest, detention, torture, ill-treatment of detainees and absence of due process in law ….” You can read the full report here.
(How could this be? Why, not so long ago, Eric Sirotkin and The National Lawyers’ Guild said the North Korean system was a paragon of fairness, and that any statement to the contrary was neocon propaganda!)
At the same time, South Korea’s quasi-independent National Human Rights Commission is also speaking up for the first time. The HRC had made a laughingstock of itself during the Roh Administration for issuing opinions about the sanctity of teenage hairstyles and diaries, and denouncing the war in Iraq, while abstaining — much like Roh’s government at the U.N. — from any inquiry into atrocities just across the DMZ. Times have changed:
An estimated 200,000 North Koreans are in six prison camps in the communist country and those inmates are under constant threat of public execution, rape and torture, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) reported Wednesday. The commission recommended that the government address the appalling human rights conditions in the prison camps as a policy priority. It also proposed that the administration chart a roadmap, along with concrete action plans, to improve the situations there.
The report by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights at the request of NHRC was based on accounts of 322 North Korean refugees who defected to South Korea after 2006. Of them, 17 had experienced the concentration camps as either inmates or guards, and another 32 went through repatriation to the North after failed attempts to flee the Stalinist state. [Korea Times]
More on the Database Center here and here.
Some of the reactions to the reports are either amusing or distressing, depending on the state of development of your sense of irony. Yonhap implies great disappointment that amendments to North Korea’s constitution seem not to have improved matters much. Generalissimo Kim Jong Il reportedly subscribes to the philosophical school that the North Korean constitution is a living, breathing document.
The Hankyoreh never disappoints, of course.
There have been critics of the reports, however. Seo Bo-hyuk, professor of Ewha Womans University’s Center for Peace Studies, said, “The South Korean government will be able to persuade the North Korean government to improve their human rights situation only when inter-Korean relations have improved. Seo added, “A unilateral demand from South Korea could stifle the improvement of inter-Korean relations. [The Hanky]
This argument is laughably circular. For years, the South Korean governments that the Hankyoreh supported realized that one of the conditions of improving relations with North Korea was never, ever mentioning anything remotely related to human rights. It meant telling North Korean defectors to die in place and abstaining from U.N. resolutions condemning the atrocities there. The price of Sunshine has always been silence and complicity, and I certainly don’t recall reading that the Hankyoreh offered a serious proposal for addressing the mass murder and starvation of North Koreans then.
Similarly, North Korea could not possibly do worse in the area of economic freedom.
North Korea ranked as the world’s worst country in terms of economic freedom for the 16th straight year in an annual survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation, according to their websites Friday. The communist state scored just one point out of a possible 100 in the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, taking the bottom spot among 179 countries surveyed, they said. [Yonhap]
Finally, these reports ought to be sobering for anyone who still believes that international institutions — specifically, the U.N. — is can or will do anything about this. The problems described in these reports have all been well known for at least a decade, but the U.N. has never taken effective action to address any of them.