What G.W. Bush Should Tell Roh Moo-Hyun
Whether you still hope that North Korea will “come back to the table” and wrestle with us in the sticky-but-hardening amber called The Six-Party Talks–or not–your hopes have been raised and dashed–or dashed and raised. I’m in the latter category, having conclusively decided on the unseriousness of negotiations with North Korea sometime around 1992, which I realize is sometime before the negotiations even began. Today, if you haven’t heard, the latest news is that the talks are off again. They’ll probably be on again tomorrow, just as I figured they’d be off again today. Yesterday, we heard that U.N. sanctions, too, were off again. I could have blogged it, but work and family duties intervened (there’s a box of unassembled Ikea particleboard krep in my basement) and I opted to wait instead, knowing that today, yesterday’s writing on the sand would be washed clean.
All of which puts us back where we were in 1992, except the part about the North Korean-made uranium hexafluoride we found in Libya. And the six nukes. And the two million missing North Koreans.
My pessimism always comes back to the same syllogism:
1. North Korea cannot be trusted without a vigorous program of external inspection.
2. A vigorous program of external inspection means foreigners with cameras and notebooks wandering around in North Korea’s underground laboratories, subterranean airfields and expressways, and remote labor camps, where hundreds of thousands starve and die. In other words, it either means that (a) North Korea’s darkest secrets will be revealed to all, or that (b) they won’t be.
3. Option (b), tried before, means a deal that does not protect our security. Option (a) will never fly because North Korea’s rulers know that if their darkest secrets are revealed to all, they’re finished. I realize some of you are wondering about some Option (c), but every Option (c) you could possibly describe is really just a dressed-up Option (b).
4. And finally, I’ll add a fourth: North Korea’s rulers care more about their own power than they care about anything we’re likely to give them at a bargaining table.
The obvious conclusion? That a verifiable deal with North Korea is about as likely as the entire crew of the Clemenceau passing their health inspections after a week of shore leave in Pattaya.
This is the part where I say, “I could be wrong.”
After all, how could so many men with such exceptional educations–John Kerry, Selig Harrison, Nick Kristof, and of course, President Roh Moo-Hyun of South Korea–be wrong? Which brings me to Roh’s visit to the White House this week. Bush, being another crude unsophisticate like myself, seems to have his doubts (a policy is another matter entirely). Roh will certainly try to convince Bush to give the talks another month, year, or decade to peddle his noxious wares before deciding that the time has come to sponsor a sternly worded General Assembly resolution. Here, then, is what I propose President Bush ought to say to President Roh when the latter predictably appeals to the former to outbid his last unanswered offer to the North Koreans:
Dear President Roh,
Thank you for your visit. As a former human rights lawyer, I know that in your heart, you share my deep concern about the suffering of the North Korean people and long, as I do, for the day when the “untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of the earth. The earth has no darker corner than North Korea, where 22 million people suffer under terror, repression, and deprivation unknown to any other people on earth today. In the last decade, approximately ten percent of North Korea’s people starved to death while their government squandered their survival on weapons and luxuries for its elite.
Our meeting will be one of those rare opportunities history affords to a very few to save many. As I need not remind you, the North Korean people are also lawful citizens of the Republic of Korea under Articles 2 and 3 of your country’s Constitution. In the name of diplomatic progress, however, you have expressed some recalcitrance about discussing human rights.
I respectfully differ from this approach. I see nothing provocative or threatening about demanding that nations treat their people with humanity. Standing for the rights of the oppressed is the penultimate act of peace, for history demonstrates that governments that oppress and murder their own eventually turn in hostility toward their neighbors. Similarly, governments that are sincerely ready for reform generally begin by relaxing their oppression of their own people. I believe that neither money, nor flattery, nor the easy tolerance of unprovoked injuries can secure peace from a nation with repression and violence at the core of its pathology. Unconditional rewards and inducements can only prolong and intensify the suffering that such regimes eventually wreak on their people, and other peoples. It is the acceptance of transparency, not of large sums of cash, that peacefully transforms regimes, secures peace, and protects innocent lives.
I thank you for your counsel that North Korea, its recent behavior notwithstanding, is sincere and amenable to disarmament for the right words and inducements. I do not know if you are correct in this assumption, but there is a straightforward way to find out. If we can test North Korea’s commitment to transparency without insisting on premature nuclear concessions, then you will have done much to persuade me that a verifiable nuclear disarmament of North Korea is possible.
Just as transparency is essential to verifiable disarmament, it is also essential to easing North Korea’s repression and hunger. If North Korea will not allow inspections of its secret laboratories, prisons, and underground facilities, a disarmament agreement cannot achieve its security objectives. And just as North Korea falsely denies the existence of its uranium enrichment program, it falsely denies the evidence about the scale of its gulag.
I believe that these issues are inextricably linked. Many of North Korea’s underground weapons facilities were built with forced labor, and its chemical weapons are allegedly tested on prisoners at its labor camps–in gas chambers. North Korea keeps its deepest secrets in “closed” areas, where foreign aid workers may not go to feed the hungry, and where the highly disparate effects of its famine are the most severe. Today, the World Food Program reports that mass famine conditions threaten to reemerge. Nevertheless, the regime continues to tighten restrictions on aid workers, who seek to assure a fair distribution of the food they provide. If North Korea is not willing to abandon this obsession with secrecy to save millions of its starving citizens, I have no confidence that it will do so to gain the trust of foreign governments.
Here, then, is how you can persuade a skeptical world of North Korea’s sincere commitment to achieving peace. You can join with the United States and other nations to make five simple demands, and then watch North Korea’s reaction:
1. North Korea must agree to the World Food Program’s inspections regime immediately and unconditionally.
2. North Korea must open its closed areas–including the gulag system in which 200,000 people are suffering and dying today–to international food and medical aid. I will offer America’s generous support in feeding the hungry and treating the sick, as I have never failed to do in the past.
3. All nations in the region, including China, must respect their obligations under the 1951 U.N. Convention on Refugees.
4. Every nation that transfers resources to the North Korean regime must make those transfers expressly contingent upon specific and verifiable improvements in human rights, including the fair distribution of food aid.
5. Every nation that uses North Korean labor or resells North Korean products must send in inspectors to insure that the workers labor in safe and humane conditions for a decent living wage.
One day, all of North Korea’s horrific oppression–the horror of the camps, the mass graves, the gas chambers, and the luxuries of Kim Jong Il’s palaces built upon the emaciated bodies of dead children–will be revealed to the world. These five simple, nonviolent demands will be the foundation of our redemption in the eyes of history. Their message, simply, is this: “Let us help to preserve the lives of those who suffer.
Nations seek to preserve peace, above all, out of their respect for human life. A regime that places a higher value on secrecy than on saving millions of its suffering people probably does not sincerely desire peace. With your help, we can quickly ascertain North Korea’s sincerity without firing a shot or making any unreasonable demands. If North Korea rejects the demands, we know that it is time to consider other options. If North Korea accepts them, we will not only have reinvigorated our talks, we may also have saved lives. This is what we in America call a no-lose proposition.
Sincerely,
G.W. Bush
P.S. Do something about this or by this time next year, U.S. Forces Korea will be a five-person weather station. Capiche?
UPDATE: Typos fixed.