Special to WorldTribune.com

By John J. Metzler

UNITED NATIONS — A growing global wave of criticism, concern and consternation continues as both the UN General Assembly and now the Security Council have firmly condemned North Korea’s communist regime for human rights abuses to its own population.

The moves come amid widening, and overdue, international attention to the reprehensible and widespread human rights situation in the reclusive and quaintly titled Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

First, the full General Assembly voted 116 in favor, 20 against, and 53 abstentions to a tough but non-binding resolution calling on the international community to improve human rights in the DPRK. Then, for the first time ever, the Security Council met specifically to cover North Korea’s human rights abuses.

The Security Council move marked a landmark human rights action called for over a decade ago here at the UN by former Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel.

“With today’s historic debate the UN finally sends the message that North Korean rulers who starve and enslave their own people must be held accountable,” opined Hillel Neuer of the Geneva-based UN Watch, a human rights advocate group.

Importantly as American Ambassador Samantha Power stated, “Today we have broken the Council’s silence. We have begun to shine a light, and what it has revealed is terrifying. We must continue to shine that light, for as long as these abuses persist.”

Given the Security Council’s consideration of crimes against humanity, there’s a growing possibility that members of the Kim Jong-Un regime may be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Though the focus of Human rights attention has little to do with the parallel uproar between the controversial Sony Pictures movie release “The Interview” and a subsequent North Korean cyber attack on the Hollywood studios, the facts remain that the DPRK dictatorship brooks no criticism, especially from a foreign film, whose parent company is based in Japan.

Pyongyang’s secretive Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB) which runs clandestine and cyber warfare operations is the likely culprit. But the focused retaliation attacks on Sony, despite DPRK intent, seem to go beyond the North Koreans’ technical capacity to execute such a move and thus may have likely sub-contracted the dirty work to Chinese hackers. The Sony story seems the grist of a layer cake of espionage and intrigue which probably goes beyond the DPRK.

North Korea’s Marxist monarchy, led by Kim Jong-Un, remains a bizarre brew of political cult, Leninist control, with a mix of traditional Korean shamanism.

Criticism of the regime, either domestically, even as we see with a satirical movie, invites retribution. Contrary to some Western spoofs of Kim as simply a spoiled brat, recall that his regime is empowered with a massive conventional military facing South Korea as well as nuclear weapons. Neither Kim nor the neo-Stalinist regime he leads, are remotely amusing unless seen perhaps from half a world away.

Australian Ambassador Gary Quinlan told the Council, “The DPRK is in effect a totalitarian state which uses violence and repression against its own citizens to maintain itself and its threatening military apparatus in power…the massive humanitarian catastrophe that has resulted from the scale of the DPRK’s reign of terror has affected all of the DPRK’s neighbors and threatened regional stability.”

Mark Lyall Grant, the British Ambassador, spoke of the “appalling situation” inside North Korea and recalled the earlier 400 page report of the UN Commission which presented a picture of the DPRK where the “components of a totalitarian state without parallel in the contemporary world.” Ambassador Grant warned the Kim leadership that, “the world is watching and that they should consider themselves put on notice.”

Human rights abuses abound with suffocating restrictions on free speech, assembly, the press and religion; at least 80,000 to 120,000 people are being held in prison camps evoking the worst of the former Soviet Gulag. And this, in a country with a relatively small population of 25 million.

The tragic truth remains that while documented human rights abuses are nothing new in North Korea, finally the world community is at long last taking notice of these glaring crimes against humanity.

John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for WorldTribune.com. He is the author of “Divided Dynamism The Diplomacy of Separated Nations; Germany; Korea, China”, 2014

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