No Seoul searching needed to get the picture on rights in N. Korea
UNITED NATIONS — The fictional British master detective Sherlock Holmes often quipped that when solving a crime the “The most obvious clue is never seen.” This saying could easily apply to the current South Korean government where on the human rights front President Roh Moo-hyun can best be accused of a “See no Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak no Evil” policy towards the totalitarians ruling its ethnic cousins in North Korea. This may soon be changing though, as the Seoul government joined a UN human rights condemnation of Pyongyang.
North Korea’s nuclear test, the growing international outrage and subsequent economic sanctions, especially from Japan, and the election of a Korean Ban Ki moon as the new United Nations Secretary General, puts Seoul in an particularly uncomfortable position vis-a-vis Pyongyang. It’s one thing to censure the North Korean communists for nuclear proliferation, but what about the horrendous human rights balance sheet for fellow Koreans living just across the 38th parallel dividing the peninsula? In recent times, there’s been an unspeakable silence from Seoul. Just last year, South Korea actually abstained in this same UN vote condemning North Korea human rights practices!
While the South Korean government has long pursued a well-intentioned “Sunshine policy” of socio/political openness towards the totalitarian North rationalizing that rays of reason and liberalism would somehow penetrate Kim Jong-Il’s Marxist Hermit Kingdom, the balance sheet of this highly subsidized life support system has not fundamentally changed the secretive and aggressive nature of the quaintly titled Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Nor has it significantly bettered the humanitarian or human rights conditions for twenty million North Koreans. Whether it has prevented the collapse or implosion of the North’s moribund Marxist system remains debatable.
The rights abuses are chronicled in a new report, “Failure to protect; A Call for the UN Security Council to Act in North Korea.” Commissioned by former Czech Republic president Vaclav Havel, former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, and supported by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, the study makes a clear and well documented call for immediate humanitarian and political action.
Among other things the Report chronicles the ongoing food crisis in North Korea; the famine in the 1990’s saw one million people die of malnutrition. Hunger and chronic starvation remains a staple in the communist country where more than 37 percent of North Korea’s children are malnourished. Nonetheless the regime has actually hindered and hampered foreign humanitarian assistance.
Moreover the document chronicles that 200,000 people are currently in political prisons; over the past thirty years some 400,000 civilians have died in the North Korean Gulag.
Nowhere else in the world today is there so “comprehensive and institutionalized” repression as in North Korea, opined former Norwegian Prime Minister Bondevik.
The conference was sponsored by the Czech Mission to the UN, whose Ambassador Martin Palous stated “In November 1989 the Velvet Revolution terminated the rule of the oppressive totalitarian regime in my country and made us, inhabitants in the heart of Europe after long decades of Babylonian captivity, free again. The message of this event is clear and simple: power of the powerless, politics, and conscience…the shared responsibility for the respect for human rights in the world.”
Vaclav Havel stressed the importance of the Security Council discussing and acting on the report. He added that while the world is rightly concerned about North Korea’s nuclear weapons, few people think about the humanitarian and human rights issues inside the impoverished land.
Given that the North Koreans government fails to protect its own people, this can be seen as a threat to international peace and security. Thus the Report calls for non-punitive measures which recommendations include; urging open access inside the country for humanitarian aid ; calling on the regime to release all political prisoners; insisting the North Koreans allow a Special UN Rapporteur on human rights to visit the country.
Separately the UN’s Third Committee voted overwhelmingly (91 yes, 21 no, 60 abstentions) to consider the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Canada, the USA, the Europeans, South Korea, and much of the developing world supported the resolution while predictably China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela among others opposed it. India, Pakistan and South Africa were among the abstentions.
Thus beyond the political and security issues, incoming Secretary General Ban Ki Moon will be confronted with a horrible human rights situation in his own Nation — Korea. Being the first UN Secretary General to come from a divided nation brings both unique social insight and political baggage to the situation.
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