Claudia Rosett on North Korea

The indispensable Claudia Rosett is one of the few big media voices–maybe the only big media voice–giving the North Korean human rights issue the attention it warrants. Ms. Rosett, for those who don’t read her bi-weekly column in the Wall Street Journal, was probably more responsible than any other journalist for digging up the facts of the oil-for-food scandal. Here are just two excerpts from her column today:

Short of war to remove the Kim regime, probably the best way into North Korean society is to welcome and encourage people coming out. That offers a chance for North Korean defectors to speak up, broadcast honest news back into the country, organize dissident groups and seek ways best known to former insiders to communicate with those still trapped under Kim’s rule.

. . . .

How the end might come for the despotic regime of North Korea, we do not yet know. It would be foolish to expect it will in any sense be easy. But it would be cruelty and madness, not to mention plain dumb foreign policy, to assume that 23 million human beings would not, like the Iraqis, welcome the chance to start the long labor of assembling a government of, by and for the people. If they do, the world will be safer for it.

Read the whole thing here.