A campaign is more than just a vote

Justice Michael Kirby, the head of U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) for Human Rights in North Korea, has struggled to get the attention of the U.N. Security Council since February of this year, when the COI released its report finding widespread and horrific crimes against humanity. This leaves Kirby wondering whether hundreds of European lives matter more to the U.N. than hundreds of thousands of North Korean lives.

Michael Kirby has called on the United Nations to show the same resolve and unanimity on North Korean human rights abuses as it did on passing a resolution on downed flight MH17. [….]

“The attention to MH17 was admirable … and I think we can all be proud of the way our ambassadors dealt with it. But in all truth, the case of North Korea is dealing with millions of people,” Justice Kirby told a university audience.

“The question is will the UN find a way to respond? In the last week, on a matter that had great sensitivity, through … strong political action, including by Australia, a consensus was found, and I’m hoping the same sort of spirit will operate in the case of North Korea when the matter comes to the Security Council.” [The Age]

Until now, the response to the COI’s report has advanced no further than a toothless, informal “Arria” meeting, where the idea of further action was discussed, boycotted by the Chinese and Russian representatives, and quickly (almost) forgotten. According to The Age‘s report, however, the General Assembly will take up the COI’s findings in September, and is expected to refer them to the Security Council soon thereafter.

This represents a modest improvement over nothing, but not by much. Major international actions require the mobilization of world opinion, and the expenditure of diplomatic capital, to achieve broad consensus and effective action. The point of a vote at the Security Council is not really to pass a resolution; after all, we already know that China and Russia will veto it. The point is to make that veto as diplomatically costly for China and Russia as possible, and to lay the diplomatic groundwork for the U.S., the EU, and a critical mass of the world’s civilized nations to enact and enforce targeted national sanctions against North Korea’s human rights violators. (Another potential benefit could be to support the establishment of an ad hoc tribunal in South Korea.) I see little evidence that this mobilization has begun.

Unfortunately, a lot of diplomatic bills are coming due at the moment, and capital is in short supply. When Susan Rice ” recently, she was correct. That has never been clearer than in recent times, when that indispensable leadership has often seemed to be absent. Samantha Power, Rice’s successor as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., first made herself famous by writing a book that excoriated the Clinton Administration’s lack of leadership in the face of the Rwanda genocide in 1994. If Power reprises Madeleine Albright’s role, one small benefit would be the exquisite material it could yield for an unauthorized sequel. If she overperforms both her predecessors and my expectations, it could be a moment of redemption for this administration, and perhaps for the viability of international institutions that have failed so consistently.

That may be asking too much in a time of national exhaustion for the world’s indispensable leader, when it lacks the psychological, political, and diplomatic capacity to contemplate more than one genocide at a time. For a month, the endless loop called Gaza had tunneled its way from its rightful place on page four to page one and occupied it, along with the attention of our Secretary of State. At the moment, we’re somewhat more justifiably preoccupied with a very real genocide that began not long after we “ended” the war in Iraq. But consider: when a regime can make tens of thousands (or tens of thousands) of men, women, and children simply disappear, or allow perhaps millions to starve — all without any material consequence — what deters psychopaths in Pyongyang or any other place from seeking out new victims, whether within their own fiefdoms or beyond their borders? As Kirby put it:

“There’s a lot of talk in the United Nations about accountability, a lot of talk about ‘rights up front’, a lot of talk about ‘responsibility to protect’, well, in September and October of this year, the UN will face up to the question of whether it is serious about this talk in the case of North Korea.”

North Korea differs from all of these other cases in the greater scale of its crimes (so far), and its capacity to propagate evil. It’s the one with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, after all, and with the demonstrated propensity to sell them to others.

You may not like the idea of America as a global leader. I suspect Americans like it less than anyone at this point. But when the alternatives come into sharper focus, we remember that it’s still the only worst alternative except for all of the others. The real question is how to exercise that leadership as wisely and cheaply as we can. It has been obvious for some time that George W. Bush had the wrong answers to that question, with the possible exception of the Surge. Judging by recent events, President Obama’s answers haven’t been much better, but like his predecessor, bitter experience is forcing him to regress from the extreme to the mean.