Making Sense of Nicholas Kristof

Nicholas Kristof is a man who knows the power of righteous indignation to save lives by hitting genocidal dictators where they’re most often vulnerable: their economies. Listen to the moral authority of Nick Kristof and the New York Times in full roar when millions face imminent mass murder:

So what can stop this genocide? At one level the answer is technical: sanctions . . . , a no-fly zone, a freeze of . . . officials’ assets, prosecution of the killers by the International Criminal Court, a team effort by [regional] countries to pressure [the government], and an international force . . . with financing and logistical support from the West.

But that’s the narrow answer. What will really stop this genocide is indignation. Senator Paul Simon, who died in 2003, said after the Rwandan genocide, “If every member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different.” The same is true this time. Web sites . . . are trying to galvanize Americans, but the response has been pathetic. I’m sorry for inflicting these horrific photos on you. But the real obscenity isn’t in printing pictures of dead babies – it’s in our passivity, which allows these people to be slaughtered. During past genocides against Armenians, Jews and Cambodians, it was possible to claim that we didn’t fully know what was going on. This time, President Bush, Congress and the European Parliament have already declared genocide to be under way. And we have photos.

That’s Nick Kristof talking about Darfur and getting it right. When millions are dying, there isn’t time to coax gradual evolutionary change out of the killers.

How odd, then, that Nick Kristof spent last week visiting Pyongyang as the reports of North Korea’s famine–with its democidally disparate impact on disfavored classes–worsened. While Nick Kristof was availing himself of the hospitality of a regime that reportedly gasses children alongside their parents and siblings, murders racially impure infants, and keeps hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in gulags, hundreds of Americans, Koreans, Japanese, and others were meeting in Washington to broadcast a message of hope directly to the people of North Korea. Kristof chooses to talk about what happened there, but clearly doesn’t know much about what took place. Of course, I have the advantage of having been there. Kristof displays his ignorance of what took place there when he says–

Actually, some people do protest. Conservative Christians have aggressively taken up the cause of North Korean human rights in the last few years, and the movement is gathering steam. A U.S.-government-financed conference on North Korean human rights convened in Washington last week, and President Bush is expected shortly to appoint Jay Lefkowitz to the new position of special envoy for North Korean human rights.

By “conservative Christians,” Kristof obviously doesn’t mean to refer to the proudly liberal Rabbi David Saperstein, or to Rabbi Abraham Cooper, or Natan Sharansky, Carl Gershman, Michael Horowitz, or Anthony Lake, or to Freedom House itself, a solidly bipartisan organization whose donors include George Soros, or to the srupulously bipartisan LiNK, whose members formed perhaps a quarter of those in attendance. But it is Kristof, with facts or without, who finds fault:

The problem with the conservatives’ approach is that it’s great at calling attention to the issues, but some of its methods are flawed and counterproductive. . . . [A] campaign by well-meaning activists to help North Korean refugees in China has so far only set off a Chinese crackdown that forced some 100,000 refugees back to North Korea. The conservative approach has generally been a mix of fulmination and isolation, which hurts ordinary Koreans, amplifies Korean nationalism and cements the Dear Leader in place.

You can’t say much about how great our movement has been at calling attention to these issues when the New York Times wouldn’t cover it. Had the Kristof chosen to talk about the story, China might not have gotten away with those deportations in the runup to its Olympic bid.

So can anything be done to help North Koreans? Yes, if liberals stop ceding the issue to conservative Christians.

Are the real humanitarians almost here to save the day? Actually, they’re already here, but Kristof is not among them. Liberals have not uniformly ceded this issue. Some liberals, like Representative Tom Lantos and former Representative Stephen Solarz, are destined to be seen as genuine heroes for the people of North Korea, as is the avowedly liberal Dr. Norbert Vollertsen. One courageous South Korean, the former labor leader Kim Min-Soo, spent time in prison for political crimes against the old authoritarian regime in the 1980s. Last week, he addressed the Freedom House conference, too. That makes him twice a hero as I see it. Others will be viewed less kindly. Among those who declined to appear at the conference: Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Evan Bayh, and Ted Kennedy (to be fair, so did Paul Wolfowitz and Condi Rice, although both appear to have given serious consideration to appearing, despite the diplomatic sensitivity of the timing). No one was more absent from this cause than the “liberal” government that holds power in Seoul today.

This is where the weakness of political taxonomy shows. Actually, liberals are divided. Some liberals adhere to what were once called liberal values and want the same freedom for the North Korean people that conservatives want–what Rabbi David Saperstein called North Koreans’ “day of justice and freedom.” Others have become outright apologists for the regime and purveyors of its worn-out excuses for a famine that coexists with an annual defense budget of $5 billion (as the World Food Program begs for $150-200 million for food aid each year). Others, uncomfortable in either camp, choose to turn away entirely, or settle into a sort of “gee, that’s horrible . . . but” realpolitik. This clearly causes Kristof some discomfort, and even some tinge of envy that in this most legitimate of human rights causes, his own stirring words are not heard.

Kristof has opted for the “gee, that’s horrible . . . but” camp. Doing this requires that he clad himself in the rhetorical kevlar of denunciation from a safe distance, describing a litany of North Korean abuses, but discouraging world outrage, calls for sanctions or international action . . . in short, the very things he was so right to call for in the case of Darfur, where the abuses never reached the scale of North Korea, horrific as they were. Separately, Kristof derided North Korean human rights as a “pet cause for conservatives” and even said, referring to those seeking to give North Koreans safe haven in China, “Heaven preserve the world’s desperate people from well-intended Americans.

A man given to soaring proposals to declare that justice be done has no bold initiatives to offer this time. Thankfully for all, Kristof does not recycle his eye-roller of a suggestion that Saddam Hussein’s regime be sued to extinction before international tribunals (brilliantly shredded here by James Lileks). Kristof actually proposed that the U.S. should “launch an effort to prosecute Saddam for crimes against humanity. This would destabilize his regime at home, encourage more defections of Iraqi officials and military officers, and increase the prospect of a coup that, in the best-case scenario, would render an invasion unnecessary.” That such a scheme would have brought down a regime as well-entrenched as Saddam’s seems to come straight from the business manual of the Underpants Gnomes, but it was no more or less plausible than his proposal to seek out Kim Jong Il’s softer side once again.

Ultimately, the solution to the nuclear standoff is the same as the solution to human rights abuses: dragging North Korea into the family of nations, as we did with Maoist China and Communist Vietnam. Our first step should be to talk directly to North Koreans, even invite senior officials to the United States.

The people of Vietnam, as I can attest, are still waiting to join the family of nations. Their elections are rigged, their press is stultified, and their churches are controlled. A visitor to Vietnam will see the majority of its citizens living in squalor in grass huts, slums, and shantytowns, while a few live in splendor. The nation resembles a series of time capsules stuck in a historical continuum stretching from medieval times to April 1975. To China, membership in the family of nations is no hindrance to imprisoning religious dissidents, (warning–extremely graphic!) sending teenage girls to firing squads, blocking out news from the outside world, or, of course, gunning down a few thousand protestors when the need arises. Both nations differ fundamentally from North Korea in their degree of willingness to compromise state control to suppress international repugnance for profit. They are marginally greedier and less malevolent, but neither shows much sign of political liberalization or progress on human rights. Even these modest improvements required something that hasn’t happened in North Korea–a decisive change of leadership to a new one that’s willing to break with the past. Even so, the family of nations to which they belong is of suspect paternity.

Second, we should welcome North Korea’s economic integration with the rest of the world. For example, we should stop blocking Pyongyang’s entry into the Asian Development Bank and encourage visits to North Korea by overweight American bankers. In a country where much of the population is hungry, our most effective propaganda is our paunchiness.

Kristof seems not to have noticed Kim Jong-Il’s waistline during his visit. One would think that if anyone’s paunchiness would be persuasive and revolutionary, it would be Kim’s. In fact, those North Koreans who represent the regime abroad are unlikely to be persuaded by our love handles. Ordinary North Koreans, to the extent they’re ever allowed to see foreigners, will be far too terrified to so much as let their stomachs growl too loudly. The suggestion–and it is beyond silly–is that the best way to force North Korea to open its entire country to fair food distribution starts with forfeiting all of our financial leverage against the regime’s diplomatic privateers. It is by equal turns verifiably false:

Having just returned from North Korea, I see a glimmer of hope, for in Pyongyang you can feel North Korea changing. Free markets are popping up. Two tightly controlled Internet cafes have opened. Special economic zones seek foreign investment. Casinos lure Chinese gamblers. Cellphones have been introduced, with restrictions. The economy has been rebounding since 2001. Plans are under way for a new Orthodox church.

Changing to what? Kristof starts by accepting whatever the mandatory minders showed him as legitimately representative, without checking the facts in much detail. Those free markets should not be mistaken for reform; they are merely a sign of North Korea’s increasingly un-Marxist approach to screwing the poor as its system dissolves. Tightly controlled Internet cafes? That means no access to anything outside North Korea itself. Special economic zones? Do read on. Cell phones? Banned and the subject of an ongoing crackdown. Rebounding economy? Try spreading starvation instead. Casino? Shut down months ago under Chinese pressure. The Orthodox church is the curious one. In fact, North Korea shoots Christians who worship or encourage others to do so. In his superb new book, Rogue Regime, Jasper Becker relates that Kim once passed a beautiful Russian church on one of his visits to Moscow and, in a moment of Pharaonic whim, demanded that his engineers build him one, too. I wouldn’t count on the celebration of any eucharists there.

Third, we should continue feeding starving North Koreans, while also pushing for increased monitoring. The food is delivered through the U.N. World Food Program in sacks that say, in Korean as well as English, that the food is from America. Nobody has done more to bring about change in North Korea than the World Food Program, which now has 45 foreigners traveling around the country.

I also believe in giving food aid to the North Korean people, and in being much more aggressive about fair distribution. This, so far, the World Food Program has failed to do with any success. Kristof shows the paucity of his knowledge when he credits the WFP for bringing about change. In fact, North Korea is the only place where the WFP has ever delegated the monitoring and distribution of aid to a failed state’s own distribution system, one that thousands of refugees claim was the subject of political manipulation. You can read much more about what numerous international NGOs, including Amnesty International, Refugees International, and Medicins San Frontieres say about this discriminatory distribution here. In fact, most refugees report never having seen any outside food aid.

Kristof should also read The Great North Korean Famine, a largely first-hand account by Andrew Natsios. Natsios details how the Clinton administration and the United Nations dithered and failed to provide effective or timely aid while millions of North Koreans were cut off from their food supply and allowed to die. The administration vascillated between disbelief in the reports of famine and simply hoping that the famine would bring down the regime. The U.N., when it finally did intervene, allowed the North Korean regime to essentially close off its three northeastern provinces to any outside food aid, a decision Natsios describes as a “triage,” and whose immediate result was that 300,000 people starved in less then a year in those areas alone. While the U.N. said almost nothing out of fear of offending the regime, millions were allowed to starve. The total death toll is estimated at anywhere from 600,000 to 3.5 million, the latter figure being supported by Medicins Sans Frontieres’ Fiona Terry and the Venerable Pomyun, who leads the respected Korean Buddhist Sharing Movement.

Why the double standard, then? This will just have to be one of those questions I can’t answer. The easy answer may be Kristof’s distaste for G.W. Bush, and Kristof’s rather clumsy effort to suggest that the Sudanese government’s limited cooperation on terrorism may have caused Bush to go soft on it. I’m not sure I buy that. Kristof has occasionally given Bush credit, such as for his generous aid for Africa. A greater temptation for some, particularly for some on the left, is to succumb to an international Stockholm Syndrome in which we seek to understand sociopaths–particularly those seen as being at odds with our own government–by imputing our own reason and mores upon them. I have no basis to impute that onto Kristof, however. What I’m left with is an inability to see how Kristof makes a principled distinction between wanting to isolate the mass murderers in Sudan while inviting the mass murderers in North Korea into the family of nations. Perhaps he can help me.

I don’t mean to suggest that Kristof lacks compassion. On some issues, notably his recent pre-election visit to Zimbabwe, his reporting was courageous and forthright. Indeed, Kristof is an exceptional reporter but has limitations as a columnist. Even so, it is the very potential and pulpit for Nicholas Kristof to do something to help the people of North Korea that make this story such a sad one, and I can’t help avoid concluding that Kristof shares that regret. Kristof–to borrow his own term–has ceded the life-preserving power of catalyzing world outrage, a power that could have put decisive pressure on this regime and its Chinese enablers rather than lending both the authority of his presence.

Contrary to Kristof’s final assertion, we have spent most of the last decade-plus trying to coax Kim Jong Il out of his shell and to buy his compassion toward his own people. This has failed convincingly. While I’m the first to admit that G.W. Bush has shown few signs of having a North Korea policy thus far, those Kristof advocates have allowed Kim Jong Il to starve millions with impunity.

Perhaps it’s time we finally withdrew the impunity.