Park: Human rights are part of “our core agenda” with North Korea

I wonder whether, when, and how these words might actually translate into tangible policy:

On Tuesday, Park made it clear that the North’s nuclear and human rights issues are “our core agenda in our policy toward North Korea.

“We should not be passive in these issues out of fear of North Korea’s backlash,” Park said in a Cabinet meeting, a comment that marked a clear departure from her liberal predecessors who rarely spoke about the human rights issue as they sought reconciliation with North Korea. [Yonhap]

The reaction from Pyongyang fully conformed to Park’s expectations:

Obsessed by the anachronistic wild ambition for “unification through absorption”, the Park Geun Hye group totally denied all the agreements reached between the north and the south and escalated confrontation with the fellow countrymen. Recently it groundlessly took issue with the nuclear program and “human rights issue” in the north at the UN, making a blatant challenge to the dignity and social system in the DPRK and glaringly revealing its despicable confrontational nature.

Park should mind that as the watchwords of “no nukes, opening and 3 000 dollars” put up by traitor Lee Myung Bak was branded as confrontational policy, her hideous “north policy” can also meet a miserable end, being rejected by the nation. [….]

Act of sycophantic treachery encroaching upon the fundamental requirements and interests of the nation will meet stern punishment by the nation. To move to settle the reunification issue by relying on outsiders is the most shameful act of sycophantic treachery today when the scramble over the Korean peninsula is getting fierce day by day. [….]

The DPRK will deal the heaviest blow to anyone who resorts to heinous hostile act of slandering its dignity and social system. The puppet group’s hostile acts of doing harm to the fellow countrymen and stirring up confrontation have gone beyond the tolerance limit. The DPRK will never pardon those who dare defame its dignity and social system, no matter who or where they might be, but deal the most merciless sledge-hammer blows to them. [KCNA, Oct. 2, 2014]

President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. The Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” Discuss among yourselves.

Park has never shown much interest in the welfare of the North Korean people before, and neither do most of the voters who elected her, so why now? My best guess is peer pressure. Park is saying these things because Japan and the EU are leading the response to the U.N. Commission of Inquiry, while South Korea and Ban Ki Moon are passive bystanders to the oppression of their fellow Koreans. Perhaps this weighs on Park’s contemplation of her legacy. It should.

One good test of Park’s sincerity will be how hard she fights to get North Korean refugees out of Chinese jails, and to keep them out of North Korean prison camps. She has done this on some occasions, and one hopes that there are other such occasions we’ve never heard about. On the issue of North Korean human rights, South Korea’s understanding and compassion are both years behind the rest of the world. I wonder how long after the collapse of North Korea it will take for South Koreans to reinvent themselves as liberators.

There’s little contemporary basis for such a description. Today, South Korea’s political left, and some elements within Park’s own party, are pressuring her to lift sanctions on the North now, despite Pyongyang’s failure to acknowledge sinking the Cheonan, oblivious to the debate at the U.N. and North Korea’s breakneck pursuit of an effective nuclear missile (which it may or may not already have). Glyn Davies adds that Pyongyang “is even more directly rejecting its responsibility to live up to its obligations to denuclearize,” and accuses it of “directly rejecting” denuclearization.

So if nothing Kim Jong Un has done justifies lifting sanctions now, why lift them now? I suppose if you’re raking in billions of won through a combination of state subsidies and slave labor, none of that matters. The same is true if you’re inflexibly, ideologically opposed to holding Pyongyang accountable for anything at all. These people couldn’t care a whit about the safety or welfare of anyone else. Their influence in Seoul is why I’m so wary of Seoul’s influence in Washington.

For now, Park is resisting these calls and sticking to the position that Pyongyang must do its part to gain her trust. That is good, but will she lead in her own nation, where leadership is so essential, and so lacking? I hope the White House is supporting her, and doing what it can to keep her from cutting a separate deal like Japan did.