The Chosun Ilbo’s Korean edition is reporting on the heartbreaking and maddening story of Kim Seong-Ryong, a 7 year-old* boy who finds himself caught between the gears of four governments that don’t care if he lives or dies. The story began as a rare exception to the terrible fate most North Korean women suffer in China. Most find themselves raped and enslaved, or end up like this woman did.
(I’ll note here that most of their South Korean sisters know this is going on, yet few seem to care as much about it as they do about the events of six decades ago.)
Some background on the North Korean refugees in China here:
In 1998, at the height of the Great Famine, Seong-Ryong’s mother crossed over, defied the odds, and met a Chinese-Korean man who married her. Because their son was born in China to a Chinese-Korean father and a North Korean refugee mother, he was born stateless. The Chinese government — in direct violation of the U.N. Refugee Convention it signed — refuses to give refuge to North Korean refugees and sends them back to near-certain death in North Korea. That means Seong-Ryong couldn’t be registered as a Chinese citizen. Still, his father found the money to pay a bribe and register him.
And they lived happily ever after.
Until one day in November of 2003, when the Chinese police came to Seong-Ryong’s house, and dragged his mother away right in front of him. He would never see her again. Seong-Ryong’s father returned home to find his wife gone. He pleaded with the Chinese police. His pleas did not persuade them. Bribes would have, but Seong-Ryong’s father couldn’t raise the ransom they demanded. Seong-Ryong’s mother was sent back to North Korea. A year later, they learned that she had been publicly executed.
Seong-Ryong’s bereaved father then left his son and went to South Korea in search of work, for reasons that aren’t otherwise clear.
Somehow, Seong-Ryong made his way to Laos, and then to Thailand, where the police caught him. And here is the situation in which he now finds himself. The Thai government, which had once treated North Korean refugees with a degree of compassion, now sends them back to China, and without divine or governmental intervention, they’ll send Seong-Ryong back, too. The likely reasons for this include pressure from those paragons of compassion in Beijing, and economic ties with North Korea that the North Koreans suddenly cultivated when large numbers of North Korean refugees started to appear in Thailand. Once the Chinese government gets its clutches on this child, it could well decide to send him to North Korea, despite the fact that he wasn’t born there and hasn’t ever lived there.
And the South Korean government? You’re going to love this. The South Korean consulate is taking the position that Seong-Ryong can qualify for Korean citizenship, but only if he submits documentation proving that his dead mother was North Korean. You can read the whole story here, and if you can make it work, there’s video, too.
Lee Myung Bak is about to have another opportunity to do something right. For the sake of this little boy’s life, let’s hope he takes it.
* The original story lists Seong-Ryong’s age as eight, but Koreans calculate age from the approximate time of conception, meaning that one’s Korean age is generally one year older than one’s Western age.
Top U.S. nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill said Thursday it is important for North Korea to submit a full and complete declaration of its nuclear activity as required under a six-party deal by the end of this month. '’It’s important we’ll get through this declaration in March. There is no drop-dead deadline, but it is important to try to get through this in March because we’re running out of time,'’ Hill said, referring to the change in the U.S. administration next year. He made the remarks during a talk at Columbia University in New York. [Kyodo News]
Last February, just after Chris Hill rolled out that landmark achievement called Agreed Framework 2.0 — how is that working out, by the way? – he went to Congress to defend his amorphous cloud of ether against some obvious questions about how the North Koreans might interpret it and what laws the agreement might actually break in its application.
You mentioned certain laws of ours that reflect human rights issues and humanitarian law. I can assure you that any agreement we reach, any agreement we finally reach, any interim agreement, will be done entirely consistent with our laws and obligations. I can promise you that, Mr. Congressman. [Amb. Christopher Hill, House Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing, Feb. 28, 2007]
Wow. He’s really good at that. Still, some members questioned Hill about whether North Korea’s human rights atrocities, arguably the worst occurring anywhere on earth since the fall of the Khmer Rouge, would be sidelined as an issue. At the time, Hill said that those issues would be dealt with in a “normalization working group,” but stated that progress on ameliorating those atrocities would be a prerequisite to the establishment of full diplomatic relations:
We must also recognize that the Beijing deal is not comprehensive. The critically-important issues of destabilizing missiles, human rights, democracy and refugees have yet to be tackled. As I have made crystal clear in all my discussions with the North Koreans, the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea can never have a fully normal relationship absent progress on these important fronts. [Amb. Christopher Hill, House Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing, Feb. 28, 2007]
Maybe it all depends on how you define “progress.” Not that I believed a word of it. At the time, it was obvious to me that Hill meant to sideline the issue. In any event, that was then and this is now:
“There are people who won’t want to recognize North Korea . . . there are people who don’t want to recognize any number of countries,” he said. “But in the context of denuclearization, I think there would be strong support.” [….] Hill said that diplomatic recognition would not imply acquiescence to North Korea’s human rights record. “Obviously we have continued differences with them, but we can do that in the context of two states that have diplomatic relations,” he said. [L.A. Times, Barbara Demick]
In retrospect, you can see Hill’s position starting to evolve last October, when he told a House subcommittee, “We have also made clear to the DPRK that discussion of outstanding issues of concern, including the DPRK’s human rights record, would be part of the normalization process.”
So we officially have no standards whatsoever, then. If Hitler and Pol Pot were alive today, would we have diplomatic relations with them, too? Kim Jong Il can run his entire prison-nation like Tuol Sleng or Mauthausen and presidents of either party will send emissaries to quaff champagne with the commandants and sign contracts for new industrial parks (no doubt, they’ll make lovely lamp shades). By extension, President Bush’s integrity on this issue is indefensible unless you really believe he’s as detached, addled, and out-of-the-loop as his crudest detractors suggest. And I don’t.
If your name happens to be Diogenes – or if you’re just looking for anyone who isn’t completely full of shit here – remember how recently the North Korean Human Rights Act was the will of a unanimous Congress. It was quietly rendered a quaint historical anachronism by a conspiracy of faceless State Department bureaucrats (see, for example, this, this, and this, explaining that State will continue to insist on “host government,” that is, Chinese concurrence before admitting any of the asylum-seeking North Korean refugees rushing our consulates there). Congress let this mixture of passive defiance and aggressive obfuscation slide with hardly a whimper of protest.
Then there are the liberals who’ve decried past U.S. support for, or trade with, far more benign regimes in Chile, El Salvador, or South Africa, but who fall silent or offer only token protest at far worse atrocities by anti-American or “Communist” regimes. What about conservatives who hammered President Clinton for his own flawed and morally compromised deal with North Korea? We seldom hear from them now that it’s a Republican President screwing things up just as badly, and far more hypcritically. Their silence today will haunt them during the Obama Administration.
Finally, let’s not forget the people’s watchdog, our news media. Barack Obama must envy the kind of uncritical media fawning that Chris Hill has received. Who will be the first to call Christopher Hill out for his mendacity?
North Korea admitted to sending engineers to military-related and other facilities in Syria during its recent talks with the United States over its nuclear program, diplomatic sources in New York said Friday. Pyongyang, however, denied its involvement in Syrian nuclear development, according to the sources. [Kyodo News]
If you say so. Could this be the beginning of a half-assed “declaration,” no doubt scrawled out on the back of a bar napkin?
(Hat tip to a friend.)
Update:Andy Jackson and John Hinderaker at Power Line have a little more. I think the really interesting admission is the one about the “materials.” What kind of materials, exactly? As John Hinderaker notes, North Korea isn’t famed for its scientific contributions in non-WMD-related fields. I’ve heard some pretty shocking rumors about North Korea and Syria, but even if I could confirm them, I wouldn’t publish them. And even if this story really is as bad as some reports have suggested, nothing Kim Jong Il does can deter the Third Clinton Administration’s blind and unyielding determination to overlook any offense, crime, provocation, or atrocity that North Korea would commit.
