UN, minus Seoul, condemns N. Korean rights abuses
UNITED NATIONS — A United Nations committee has powerfully condemned North Korea’s human rights record. In a tough resolution before the General Assembly’s Social and Humanitarian committee, the document expressed serious concern about “widespread and grave” human rights abuses by the retro-Stalinist dictatorship.
The vote on the European Union sponsored resolution in itself was quite telling—84 to 22 with 62 abstentions. In other words the European countries, the U.S., Canada and most of Latin America backed the human rights resolution. The most surprising supporters of the document—brace yourself—Syria and Serbia.
The No votes, besides the accused the quaintly titled Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea), included Belarus, Cuba, Islamic Iran, People’s China, Russia, Venezuela, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe.
Abstentions included many countries who either have trampled on their own citizens rights for various political, ethnic or religious reasons and thus fear a precedent of outside attention, or are cowed and take the middle path of being non judgmental towards blatant tyranny. Those states include Algeria, Burundi, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Senegal.
Sadly the most interesting abstention leading the list was South Korea itself—and I won’t say with any particular honor except to take the politically correct and appeasement mode stance to the Stalinist tyranny in the North.
Seoul’s delegate opined that South Korea shares the serious concerns of the international community regarding the human right situation” in North Korea but equally has “other crucial objectives in out policy to the DPRK.” The South Korean government has in a stroke of dubious compromise, willingly allowed millions of its fellow Korean compatriots to languish in the Marxist Kingdom of Kim Jong-il.
While I fully understand the delicate political balance on the divided Korean peninsula, the stance by Seoul glaringly reminds me of some West German governments before the fall of the Berlin Wall, who would often self-consciously excuse, rationalize, coddle and appease the regime in communist East Germany. There too the extent of human rights violations were glaringly apparent but the political will to publicly challenge the regime in the East was equally lacking.
The UN resolution cited human rights violations in North Korea including “torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, public executions, extrajudicial and arbitrary detention, the absence of due process and the rule of law, the imposition of the death penalty for political reasons, the existence of a large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labor,” in Kim Jong-il’s fiefdom.
The labor camps, evoking the Soviet Gulag system, and the above mentioned crimes, evoke Maoist China during the height of its madness. Few countries in the world use such a widespread, systematic and focused use of a political apparatus as does Pyongyang’s totalitarian regime.
During his recent East Asian visit, President George W. Bush warned, “Satellite maps of North Korea show prison camps the size of whole cities, and a country that at night is clothed almost in complete darkness.”
Equally the wider humanitarian food shortages created by North Korea collective farms and the subsequent malnutrition including “the prevalence of infant mortality,” stand as further indictments to a heinous regime who has developed the nuclear genie but which can’t figure out how to feed its own people.
So shall such a resolution really change much in North Korea’s hermit Kingdom?
Cynics will quickly say that such international pressures will harden the repression.
Apologists will add that such a “meaningless resolution will only insult Kim Jong-il.” Realists will chime in that something like this “while politically feel-good for the outside world may actually make matters worse inside North Korea.” Quite possibly, but should the world community knowingly and willfully look the other way from this terror, what does that say about our own morality?
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense
issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com. |
