Why is North Korea still in the U.N.?

Oh, those wacky North Korean diplomats. If they aren’t shouting death threats in a U.S. congressional office building or making racial slurs against African diplomats, they’re smuggling dope, counterfeit money, or gold, or generally behaving like complete tools at U.N. hearings. You can accuse them of many things, but you can’t deny that they represent their government perfectly. Here is how they represented their government today:

A U.S.-organized event on North Korea’s human rights briefly turned into chaos at the U.N. on Thursday as North Korean diplomats insisted on reading a statement of protest, amid shouts from defectors, and then stormed out. [”¦.]

Defectors stood up and shouted in Korean as Power and others called for calm and a U.N. security team assembled. An observer who speaks Korean said the shouts included “Shut up!” ”Free North Korea!” ”Down with Kim Jong Un!” and “Even animals know to wait their turn.”

“There is no need for a microphone,” Power said as one North Korean diplomat persisted in reading out a statement that referred to “ungrounded allegations” and “hostile policy” toward his country. A microphone was briefly turned on for the diplomats.

Power continued: “Please shut the mike down because this is not an authorized presentation. … Please ensure that the microphone is not live. … We are calling U.N. security.”

As soon as the North Korean diplomat stopped talking and the next featured defector, Jay Jo, started speaking, the North Korean diplomats stood and walked out.

“They’re so rude,” Jo said later, adding that she wished that the diplomats had stayed so she could have spoken with them. The U.S. said North Korea had been informed before the event that it would have a chance to speak. [AP, via New York Times]

It’s another great moment in public relations, North Korean style, and shortly after a U.N. dweeb named Ivan Simonovic said that North Korea had shown “new signs of engagement.” Evidently, Simonovic hadn’t heard that Kim Jong Un bailed on his Moscow trip this morning. For “internal” reasons. Hmm.

Samantha Power serves an administration without an effective North Korea human rights policy, but she conducted herself well today. When the North Koreans began to heckle and interrupt, at first, she told them to wait their turn. Later, she said, “The audience will agree that it’s better to allow the DPRK to speak, since it is a self-discrediting exercise, and we will resume our panel. Conclude your statement, and we will go back to our panel.”

As the event came to a close, Power said the “true weapons of mass destruction” in North Korea was the tyranny of its government against its citizens.

But the best reaction came from my good friend, Daniel Aum:

“What is most striking here is not North Korea’s attempt to chill speech, but that its increasing willingness to export its policies, including the Sony Pictures hack, to the U.S,” said Daniel Aum a fellow with the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights who attended the event.

I doubt very much that the AP and the Times would have published their coverage of this event if not for the behavior of these “diplomats,” which is a tragic thought if you watch the video (hat tip: Roberta Cohen).

If you don’t have time to watch this today, bookmark it and watch the whole thing later. The rumble starts at 17:30, but don’t just skip to that. Watch the wonderful Barbara Demick’s introduction, and the heartbreaking story of Joseph Kim (at 6 minutes). At 20 minutes, defector Jinhae Jo (in red) calmly and bravely confronts her former persecutors, telling them to stop spouting ignorant nonsense, and later, to stop lying. Then, the other defectors join in and shout back. At 24 minutes in, when Jo starts speaking and holds up her new American passport, the North Korean diplomats walked out. They did not hear her weep as she described saying goodbye to her dying brothers and sisters, one after another. I dare you to watch it and not weep with her.

At 57:45, another witness reports that she received threatening texts, in an attempt to intimidate her into silence. She also claims that one day, she found a man with a knife in her house.

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.

~   ~   ~

It all causes me to wonder ” why is North Korea even in the U.N., an institution whose values, proceedings, and resolutions it holds in such contempt? Under Article 4 of the U.N. Charter, membership is open to “all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgment of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.” Under Article 6, “a Member of the United Nations which has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” Well? Well?

As a practical matter, expelling a member state is hard. The U.N. never quite managed to expel South Africa (thanks to U.S. and U.K. veto threats), but in 1968, it banned “cultural, educational, sporting and other exchanges with the racist regime,” and in 1984, it purported to nullify a “racist” new South African constitution. It did manage to kick Taiwan out in a roundabout way, by giving China’s seat to the Chicoms, and then by denying Taiwan entry.

Kicking North Korea out of the U.N. wouldn’t mean that humanitarian programs couldn’t continue there. Gaza isn’t a U.N. member state, and the U.N. operates there. Of course, whether the U.N. should give North Korea food aid is a different question entirely. At the one-hour mark, the Dutch Permanent Representative asks the defectors whether we should be giving North Korea food aid. They all voted no.

~   ~   ~

Update: Ambassador Power’s full closing remarks, below the fold. Another hat tip to Roberta Cohen for forwarding them.

USUN PRESS RELEASE                                                                   

April 30, 2015

AS DELIVERED

Remarks by Ambassador Samantha Power, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, at a Panel Discussion on Human Rights Abuses in North Korea, “Victims’ Voices: A Conversation on North Korean Human Rights,” April 30, 2015

Well, first, let me just thank everybody for taking time out of their day to be here. Every one of you, I think, sends an important signal with your presence about the importance of this issue, and especially so many of my colleagues ”“ ambassadors ”“ who’ve taken the time and heard these harrowing stories. I also, I mean, my gratitude to the presenters is hard to put into words. We are all in awe of your perseverance. We know that every time you re-tell your story, it means reliving the horrors that you have experienced, thinking about your family members, and we want to thank you for putting yourself through that, and for enduring that pain, so that we have a better sense of what’s going on behind closed lines.

We’re also very grateful to the other defectors who’ve traveled here today for this event; and your presence, just as that of those up here on the stage, testifies to the fact that these are just a few stories of millions; and we know that and we really thank you for being here and every day that you tell your stories to your neighbors, to people around you, you can broaden the circle of people who understand the cruelty of this regime and the pain that your fellow countrymen and women are going through.

Barbara, thank you very much for not only being here today, but for dedicating so much of your life to documenting what’s happening outside of the public eye; it’s been extremely important. I thank my friend, Ambassador Joon Oh, from the Republic of Korea, who used Korea’s time on the Security Council, with Australia, the United States, and other countries, to ensure that this issue is seen as and treated as an issue not only of human rights, which it is, but an issue of international peace and security, because it is an extremely destabilizing situation; and it is important that for the first time ever, thanks to the leadership of Joon and others, this issue will be on the Security Council ”“ not just because of the nuclear issue and the proliferation challenge that North Korea presents, but because the true weapon of mass destruction inside North Korea is the treatment of its people and the destruction of those lives.

I do want to say a word about the disruption. I thank the audience, particularly the Koreans among us here, the North Koreans among us, for your patience and your restraint in the face of the interruption that we experienced by the DPRK delegation. This delegation was informed before this event started that it would have occasion to speak as soon as we had heard from the defectors, who were the centerpiece of today’s event. And unfortunately, as you heard, the delegation chose instead to try to drown out the testimony of these panelists and I will say, it must be chilling for those of you who have been subjected to the terror of the regime to be confronted with bullying and disruption and the kind of behavior that we saw today.

But I assure those of you who are up here on the panel and all of you in the audience who are from North Korea that such statements are totally self-discrediting. And nothing detracts from the power and the credibility of the testimony that we’ve heard today or, of course, from the horror of your experience which you carry with you every day.

I just want to touch on three of the themes that we heard about today in order to underscore the importance of this event and of the human rights crisis inside North Korea. The first is the raw, painful hunger that today’s speakers and the people of North Korea are ”“ these speakers have experienced and the people of North Korea are experiencing every day. It was extreme hunger that took the life of Joseph’s father and hunger that later wracked Joseph as an orphaned, homeless teenager, sleeping under bridges. It was hunger that killed off, as we heard so movingly, three generations of Jay Jo’s family members: her grandmother, who starved to death while digging for grass to eat. Her father, who starved to death in a prison camp where he was sent just for trying to find food for his family. And of course, her younger brother, who starved while Jay and her mother were out searching for food.

Aside from the defectors here today, I suspect none of us, none of the rest of us, have ever experienced hunger like that. A hunger that is one of the most potent weapons used by the North Korean regime to dehumanize the people of North Korea and to keep them unable to stand up for their aspirations and their rights. And as a parent, I cannot imagine the pain of being unable to feed one’s starving child. It’s an unthinkable, double pain.

The second theme that we heard addressed today is, of course, about the regime’s use of terror to silence and divide people. Aristotle wrote that the overarching aim of a tyrannical system is, “to endeavor by every means possible to keep all the people strangers to each other.” And we see this at work when Hye-sook talks of prisoners assigned to groups of three and told to monitor one another and then beaten with a wrench if they did not comply. And we see it in her description of being forced to watch the executions of fellow prisoners whose sole crime was asking why they had been imprisoned.

Third, and finally, we’ve heard about the complicity of those countries that are forcibly repatriating North Koreans back to North Korea after they have risked everything to escape. Joseph was sent back to North Korea against his will in 2008 and his mother was sent to a prison camp, where he suspects that she remains, for daring to escape the country. Jay, her sister, and her mother, as we heard, were also subjected to multiple forced repatriations before they finally found refuge in a third country.

We know the gruesome punishments that await North Koreans who are sent back against their will and yet the practice continues every day. It must stop and we urge China and all countries in the region to protect North Korean refugees and asylum seekers who reach their territories. This is extremely important.

Finally, Joseph spoke at the beginning of this meeting about feeling an ever-present burden because millions of people are still trapped in North Korea, in the North Korea that he managed to escape. He knows the human rights violations that he and many, all of the other defectors here today, endured ”“ the hunger, the terror, the forced repatriation ”“ and he and all of us know that those violations persist, even as we sit here. And this awareness, this sense of responsibility, is what drives defectors to continue to tell their stories even at great pain to themselves. We, the rest of us, cannot allow Joseph and the other defectors here to carry that burden alone. We must ensure that their voices and those of other defectors are amplified here at the UN, at the Security Council, and well beyond.

And we must not be satisfied with telling the stories, but we have to collectively continue to ramp up the pressure on this regime, so that this system, a system built to strip people of their most basic rights and dignity, comes to an end and the perpetrators behind the kind of terror and forced starvation that we’ve heard about are brought, finally, to account.

So thank you all, above all, those of you who’ve come from North Korea, who’ve shared with us your burden and who’ve relived, again, such painful memories. We leave this meeting activated and emboldened by what you have shared with us and the trust you have placed within us.

Thank you.

###