For China, holocaust denial substitutes for diplomacy
It’s offensively obtuse things like this that convince me that Chinese will eventually be as despised in North Korea as Japan is despised in South Korea, and that its profiteers won’t be safe to walk the streets of Rajin:
“The inability of the commission to get support and cooperation from the country concerned makes it impossible for the commission to carry out its mandate in an impartial, objective and effective manner,” said Chen Chuandong, a counselor at China’s mission in Geneva. [Yonhap]
In the same spirit, how can we really be so sure the Rape of Nanking and Unit 731 weren’t figments of biased imaginations without Hideki Tojo’s “support and cooperation?” Speaking of support and cooperation, North Korea just missed another opportunity to offer it:
“So Se Pyon first interrupted a statement by the head of the Japanese Association of Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea to challenge his right to address the council, before standing up and walking out in protest.” [AFP]
“The commission of inquiry on the DPRK is none other than a marionette representing the ill-minded purpose of its string pullers including the United States and its followers who are endeavoring to eliminate the socialist system on the pretext of human rights,” North Korea’s ambassador So Se Pyong told the U.N. rights forum this month. [Reuters]
See, if Goering had just refused to cooperate with the Nuremberg Tribunal, he’d have lived out his autumn years shooting up smack in his hunting lodge in the Black Forest.
Inquiry leader Kirby said it is time to act rather than talk. “What is unique has been the capacity of North Korea to avoid international scrutiny, to avoid examination of its record over such a long time, effectively 60 years of very great wrongs against its population,” he told Reuters.
“Now we have a full volume book that tells it all in a comprehensive manner. The moment of truth has approached. We must turn it into action,” he added.
Human rights were among the founding principles of the United Nations in the wake of World War Two, after discovery of atrocities against Jews and minorities, he said. He wants North Korea referred to the ICC or to a special ad hoc tribunal. [Reuters]
Modern-day Japan, notwithstanding its problems coming to terms with its past crimes against humanity, is at least leading the effort at the U.N. to hold North Korea accountable for crimes against humanity in the present tense. Modern-day China is doing its best to aid, abet, and perpetrate them:
China strongly criticized Tuesday a high-profile U.N. report on human rights situations in North Korea that said Beijing may be “aiding crimes against humanity” by repatriating North Korean defectors to their homeland against their will.
“We totally cannot accept this accusation,” China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters, a day after U.N. investigators condemned North Korea for widespread human rights abuses under the leadership of Kim Jong-un.
China, the North’s key ally, has considered tens of thousands of North Koreans hiding in the border areas as illegal migrants, not asylum-seekers, and routinely sends them back to North Korea, where they face harsh penalties, even death.
Hua repeated China’s stance on North Korean defectors, saying Beijing views them as “illegal border-crossers,” not “defectors,” therefore not subject to protection. [Yonhap]
This is why I can’t understand why anyone — least of all, any Korean — could plausibly see modern-day Japan as a threat to peace, or fail to see China as a threat to peace, or as an imminent and mortal threat to the lives and dignity of 23 million Koreans. Oh, those are North Koreans? In that case, never mind.
Joshua, at your “fail to see China” link, Bonnie S. Glaser says, “First, the United States should ratify UNCLOS;” do you agree? And do you think the United States Senate should approve it, this making it part of the supreme law of the land?
I don’t have an opinion about UNCLOS, which is why I didn’t write a post about it.
Who doesn’t accept UNCLOS?
Excluding land-locked countries:
these have signed but not ratified – Cambodia, Colombia, El Salvador, Iran, North Korea, Libya, United Arab Emirates;
these have not signed – Eritrea, Israel, Peru, Syria, Turkey, United States, Venezuela.
So we’re in pretty good company.
Source: Wikipedia.
Tojo and Goering et al. were part of war machines which invaded other countries and carried out atrocities against their peoples — war crimes, and the representatives of the victims quite rightly got justice. It would have been much more difficult — in fact it wasn’t even tried — to convict Goering of crimes against the German people (appalling as it was, Jews weren’t German citizens at the time, just as black South Africans were not South African citizens until the end of apartheid, and nobody has been held responsible for that) or Tojo of crimes against the Japanese people. The wartime sufferings of the German and Japanese peoples under Allied bombardment were never, at least not at the war crimes trials, laid at the feet of Goering and Tojo.
Paul, trying officials of a government for the domestic effects of a conflict with a foreign state isn’t at issue. Furthermore, Goering was charged with crimes against humanity for his part in the Holocaust, and for nacht und nebel disappearances of German dissidents. Other Nazis (Kaltenbrunner, Seyss-Inquart, and Streicher, to name just three) were prosecuted and sentenced to death for their contributions to the Holocaust.
Tojo was held responsible for war crimes committed by Japanese troops in foreign countries (Some say the Japanese emperor was ultimately responsible), not crimes against Japanese citizens, many of whom were persecuted and killed on his watch. The Holocaust was a crime of genocide — the attempt by one race to exterminate another. It is difficult to see how North Korea fits in here.
In addition, the remit of the UN human rights commission, as stated in the very first paragraph of the report, was not to investigate the accusations of human rights violations in NK but to indict NK for human rights violations actually being committed. In other words the accused was assumed to be guilty before any investigation was held. That was why the commission could carry on with its work without entry to the DPRK. It didn’t need access. The accused was already condemned. Again, it is difficult to see why the DPRK would cooperate in its own condemnation.
Paul, your statement is simply not true. Here’s what the first paragraphs of the COI report actually say:
And then, you proceed to make the obtuse argument that North Korea’s flat-out denial of the witness’s allegations, and its refusal to allow the UN COI or ANY OTHER “objective” investigator into North Korea to investigate the allegations, suggests that the allegations are less (rather than more) likely to be true.
You’re 0 for 2. Wanna try again?
Dear Joshua,
Read that first paragraph again. Carefully this time.
Paul, It calls for an INVESTIGATION. You said, “In addition, the remit of the UN human rights commission … was not to investigate the accusations of human rights violations in NK but to indict NK for human rights violations actually being committed.” The language does not mention indictment. Your statement was false. I can’t decide whether you lied or don’t care what the truth is.
Dear Joshua,
Any lawyer will tell you that the words “to investigate the systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights in the DPRK” means that the DPRK is conducting systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights. Guilty before trial. The Commission included these words to make sure the DPRK didn’t invite it in — as it might have (It’s a big MIGHT, I know) if its remit had been to investigate claims, accusations, etc., and leave open the possibility that some of them might not be true. It could have found, for instance, that there were no gulags where some people say Google maps show them. To say that they found no evidence (perhaps due to NK obstructionism?) would have seriously weakened their damning indictment.
Another question is why did the Commission include a gratuitous swipe at China, surely knowing that China would veto the report and its recommendations at the Security Council? At the risk of sounding paranoid (I live in China, so perhaps that’s excusable)it seems that the Commission didn’t want the report binding on the UN members in case it came under unfriendly scrutiny. This way, its accusations can be floated among the gullible and China blamed for obstructing human rights efforts again. Just a thought.
Paul, I’m a lawyer, and I think your interpretation is baseless, illogical, and paranoid. The swipe at China is not gratuitous. It’s based on well-documented evidence that China has violated commitments it undertook when it signed the U.N. Refugee Convention and various protocols to it.
I am completely unsurprised to hear that you live in China, by the way.
Now he is 0 for 3.
Dear Joshua,
This is getting tedious. I was surprised to hear that you are a lawyer, because I was going to suggest you find one to explain to you the difference between “mandated the body to investigate the systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights etc.” (the wording of the Commission’s remit) and “mandated the body to investigate the CLAIMS/CHARGES/ALLEGATIONS of systematic, etc.”
I didn’t think the point was so subtle, but it seems I was wrong.
This should make the score 4:0 by my reckoning.
Over and out.
Oh, I nearly forgot: “Gratuitous” means “not necessary in the circumstances.” It doesn’t mean “false.”
Paul, I know what gratuitous means. And you’re splitting hairs to construct support for your false assertion that would scarcely be relevant if it were true. Thousands of North Koreans have recounted the atrocities they personally witnessed, in the media and in at least a dozen cases, in congressional hearings I’ve witnessed. The investigation began at least ten years too late, after a large body of compelling evidence had accumulated to the point that it was making a farce of the U.N. itself. China and North Korea simply denied all of that evidence, while denying the world access to North Korea and China, suggesting that they have something to hide. Is it your position that the COI should have pretended that this evidence didn’t exist? North Korea was given a fully opportunity to rebut the charges. It could have given the COI the run of North Korea, allowing it to find nothing but smiling cherubic infants eating steaming bowls of kalbittang. It could have thrown open the Gates of Camp 16 to the world and said, “See, just an ordinary farming village!” That they wouldn’t was fairly foreseeable. It’s the sort of tactic that’s only persuasive, thank goodness, to a few exceptionally obtuse people.
Dear Joshua,
I promise that this is definitely the last posting.
“Thousands of North Koreans have recounted…” For millions of years every man, woman and child on this earth saw every day of their lives the sun rise in the east and set in the west. They were wrong — every single one of them, every day of their lives for millions of years. The sun, of course, doesn’t move.
Isn’t it by splitting hairs that lawyers (real lawyers, I mean) send some people to the gallows and others to freedom?
being tortured and natural phenomena -> same same!