Rabbi Cooper’s Op-Ed in the Washington Post

Full text here.

Since 2002, defectors among the flood of refugees from North Korea have detailed firsthand accounts of systematic starvation, torture and murder. Enemies of the state are used in experiments to develop new generations of chemical and biological weapons that threaten the world. A microcosm of these horrors is Camp 22, one of 12 concentration camps housing an estimated 200,000 political prisoners facing torture or execution for such “crimes” as being a Christian or a relative of someone suspected of deviation from “official ideology of the state.” Another eyewitness, Kwon Hyuk, formerly chief manager at Camp 22, repeated to me what he asserted to the BBC: “I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. . . . The parents were vomiting and dying, but until the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.”

So why no worldwide outrage?

For now it appears that realpolitik trumps distant horrors. Despite heroic efforts by Christian activists on both sides of the Pacific to sound the alarm, the South Korean government views these accusations as unwelcome complications to its problematic and complex relations with the North. Indeed, a foreign ministry official whom I met did not deny that North Korea gassed political prisoners to further its program to develop weapons of mass destruction. He politely stated that Seoul was focusing exclusively on the threat from Pyongyang’s nuclear program in the context of the six-nation peace talks. Meanwhile, most South Korean nongovernmental organizations are so committed to the idyllic vision of a reunified Korean Peninsula that they have turned a deaf ear to the horrors inflicted on their own people north of the 38th parallel.

The Western media haven’t exactly ignored this story. Instead, they have generally treated it in an offhand manner chillingly reminiscent of how the Holocaust was reported during World War II.

I’m having just as much trouble as Rabbi Cooper understanding why the press’s North Korea coverage overwhelmingly focuses on the nuclear issue while scarcely mentioning human rights. The gas chambers story, unconfirmed as it necessarily is, went virtually unmentioned in the U.S. media, even as the British media gave the story considerable attention. It’s ironic that the Post, which printed this op-ed yet has awful North Korea reporting, is the worst offender in this regard. When you consider the evidence of the “systematic starvation” Rabbi Cooper refers to, and then consider that it cost anywhere from several hundred thousand to three million lives, you can’t help questioning the media’s sense of priorities yet again.