Why Kang Chol Hwan, Ronald Reagan, and Machiavelli Are Right, and John Lennon Wasn’t
I have some bad news for Selig Harrison: John Lennon was wrong, and Machiavelli was right. In Pyongyang, love is not all you need. Fear is. The Washington Post:
At the end of a private Oval Office meeting this week, President Bush asked a North Korean defector to autograph his book recounting a decade in a North Korean prison camp.
“If Kim Jong Il knew I met you,” Bush then asked, referring to the North Korean leader, “don’t you think he’d hate this?”
“The people in the concentration camps will applaud,” the defector, Kang Chol Hwan, responded, according to two people in the room.
Bush lately has begun meeting personally with prominent dissidents to highlight human rights abuses in select countries, a powerfully symbolic yet potentially risky approach modeled on Ronald Reagan’s sessions with Soviet dissidents during the Cold War.
Score one for OFK in the debate about whether Bush is reviving the Reagan Doctrine. Score another one for OFK in the debate with the Selig Harrisons and Chung Dong-Youngs of the world–namely, for my thesis that in dealing with North Korea, being loved means less than nothing; it is being feared that matters. The North fears what Kang Chol-Hwan has to say. Kang persuaded me that KJI should kick his warped little life away at the end of a hangman’s noose. What if everyone in America knew what had happened to Kang Chol-Hwan? The WaPo story continues:
According to an account published by Kang in the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo — and confirmed by [a senior White House aid] — he urged the president to make it his priority to free those held in North Korea’s prison camps. “For North Koreans,” Kang said he told Bush, “human rights issues are more desperate than nuclear issues.”
Bush, according to Kang, said he thought that the human rights situation in North Korea was serious but that others often did not understand it. He told Kang that “it breaks my heart” to learn of pregnant women and children starving in North Korea. Kang told him that the North Korean military often takes donated international food for itself. Bush said that if Pyongyang makes fundamental changes, “the U.S. will deliver a lot of food and funds to North Korea,” Kang recalled.
To hear Chung Dong-Young tell it, you’d think that what’s really holding up all of this nuclear diplomacy is W’s extremist rhetoric and criticism of Kim’s regime. Just look at what happened next.
“Mutual recognition and respect is the most important thing at negotiations,” Mr. Chung quoted the North’s leader as saying.
In contrast to the often heated language used by both sides to describe each other’s leaders, Mr. Kim said he “has no reason to think badly” of President Bush, according to Mr. Chung.
More, from the Washington Post:
Chung said he asked Kim what he thought of Roh’s comment that Bush had upgraded his treatment of the North Korean leader by referring him as “Mr. Kim.” He said Kim replied, “Should I designate him as Mr. President, then? I have no reason to think bad of President Bush.”
Kim said he heard from Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that President Bush is “an interesting man, a good man, who could have a good conversation,” Chung said. He said Kim told him he has thought highly of the United States since the Clinton administration and stressed the importance of respecting one’s negotiating partner.
Did I mention that North Korea summarily called Chung and summoned him straight from his morning jog?
Now, you can believe that calling Kim Jong-Il “mister” means more than hawking a book about his gulags, taunting him, and leaking the taunts to the press. You can also believe that a regime can be simultaneously isolated by hostile U.S. diplomacy and capable of snatching foreign governments’ ministers off the streets to deliver greetings to the POTUS. I posit otherwise: the North fears what Kang Chol-Hwan has to say and understands that if Bush keeps saying it, his aid-seeking survival strategy would be foreclosed.
But above all, the fact of this meeting–which lasted about as long as Bush’s meeting with President Roh himself–demonstrates that President Bush is determined to keep the issue on the table.
I emphatically believe that a demand that North Korea either allow an inspection of the camps or allow food aid into closed areas would be an excellent way of testing its commitment to the transparency needed for arms inspections. That said, I know what President Bush is thinking, because The Case for Democracy makes it fairly clear. Bush think that Kim will agree, because this discussion can be deferred indefinitely once he has his security guarantees. Bush thinks that once the issue is on the table, Kim has swallowed the fatal hook that’s tied to the 20-lb.-test line, and that it will mean he’s increasingly required to accept openness and transparency as the price of more aid.
I think that President Howard Dean could erase such an emphemeral, symbolic gain in the stroke of a pen. I also think it’s a good start on which we can improve.
Observers are detecting a shift in focus in Washington’s North Korea policy from the Stalinist country’s nuclear program to its dismal human rights record. U.S. President George W. Bush’s active interest in North Korean human rights was given its most prominent expression yet when he met at the White House with North Korean defector and Chosun Ilbo journalist Kang Chol-hwan on Monday to discuss the realities of North Korea’s prison camps.
And this, which you should read with great skepticism:
The paper quoted a diplomatic source as saying the book was one reason Bush will not compromise with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il even though China is asking the U.S. Administration to yield to Pyongyang on certain points so six-party nuclear disarmament talks can resume.
More, from this Chosun Ilbo editorial:
The meeting inevitably invites comparison with our own country’s approach. Why has the Korean president never invited a single North Korean defector to Cheong Wa Dae and listened to their vivid accounts of the inhuman treatment North Koreans endure? It has been a long time since programs dealing with human rights in the North have disappeared from South Korea’s public broadcasters.
The fundamental question is if our society feels any degree of anger about the miserable human rights situation in North Korea. The same people who are hell-bent on probing every human rights abuse committed decades ago by South Korea’s regimes take a vastly more lenient approach to human rights abuses in the North. Everybody knows about them, they say. They aren’t verifiable. You only bring it up to undermine the North Korean regime.
We may differ about the most effective way of addressing the human rights situation in North Korea. But it is incomprehensible that the most vocal champions of human rights, whose sense of virtuous outrage transcends time and space, look on the quite unparalleled misery and abuse our brothers in North Korea suffer with equanimity.
Predictably, South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon downplayed:
Asked during a briefing with reporters about the meeting between Bush and Kang, Ban said, “The North Korean human rights situation is already widely known, not just in the United States, but also worldwide… I don’t think the meeting will influence the development of either the six-party talks to resolve the North Korean nuclear dispute or inter-Korean relations.”
UPDATE: Bad editing fixed.
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