Appeasement Is Losing the Battle for World Opinion
North Korea’s recent move to end foreign food aid threatens a Great Famine of 2006, but the move comes too late to evade the attention of the world, which means that this time, nations of the world may actually insist that the hungry are fed.
The movement to bring world attention to North Korea’s treatment of its own people may have matured just in time to matter. It coalesced on April 28, 2004 and attained its political bona fides with the passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act. Since then, Kang Chol-Hwan was granted a lengthy meeting with President Bush, preempting the leader of his own country, and Freedom House held a North Korea conference (see sidebar) that attracted some of the world’s greatest intellectual talent on the propagation of freedom. That conference will soon reconvene in Seoul and Europe.
This week, two reports suggest that both Koreas are failing in their tandem campaigns to diffuse political and diplomatic attention from human rights issues in the North. First, the Chosun Ilbo covers a human rights conference in California:
Participants at a seminar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute on Thursday went as far as to say North Korea’s human rights violations could take on the dimensions of the holocaust unless the international community wakes up to the problem and steps up pressure on Pyongyang over an issue they said was as important as the country’s nuclear arms program.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in the United States, said because the international community in the 1930s underestimated German human rights abuses under the Nazi regime and attempted to appease Hitler, six million Jews died. By the same token, the North Korean human rights issue must take center-stage in the international community. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is an international Jewish watchdog with 400,000 members.
Prof. Stephen Haggard of the University of California in San Diego said only about 7 percent of North Korean citizens testified to having seen international food aid, and the international community has yet to hear from the other 93 percent. Only if North Korea embraces democracy can the starvation situation in the country truly be resolved. Defense Forum Foundation president Suzanne K. Scholte, a high-profile campaigner for North Korean rights, said more pressure needed to be put on the Chinese government to resolve issues like its deportation of North Korean defectors.
Second is a story of the kind that has long since lost its capacity to bowl us over with dismay. South Korea’s Human Rights Commission, which has finally released a report on human rights in North Korea, seems very worred that the world is so concerned:
Seoul is failing to find international understanding for repeatedly abstaining from votes on a UN Human Rights Commission resolution condemning North Korea’s human rights record, South Korean diplomats in the U.S. say.
Their remarks are cited in a 20-page report drawn up by three members of Korea’s National Human Rights Commission including Choi Young-ae after a visit to the U.S., according to Grand National Party lawmaker Kim Jae-yung, who obtained the report.
Not only failing to find understanding today, but from history in retrospect.
The report quotes the diplomats as saying South Korea was unable to persuade the international community that its abstention is based on the delicate character of inter-Korean relations. They say it would be better to try and explain the position by the logic of human rights.
The diplomats also recalled that Seoul attempted to persuade Washington to tone down the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004.
The goal of this Human Rights Commission seems to be something other than advancing human rights. How odd. It’s a point that’s not lost on all Koreans, either:
The NHRC has issued opinions on everything from inspecting the diaries of elementary school students to regulations for middle and high school students’ haircuts but has so far been silent on human rights in North Korea. It says a cautious approach is needed given the effect its comments could have on inter-Korean relations.
As for the report itself, I will have to trust the Chosun Ilbo’s judgment that it contains nothing new. The real story seems to be how reluctantly it was issued, and the extraordinary lengths to whicht the HRC has gone to distance itself from what’s nominally its own report:
“There were demands from within and without the commission to express interest in the North Korean human rights issue,” a staffer with the Dogguk institute said. “I understand the report was commissioned to get objective data to judge by.” The report states on its first page it “contains the research results carried out by a commissioned body, and we make clear that it does not reflect the position of the NHRC.”
An NHRC official also said the report was merely “internal reference material. We have no plans to announce it as an official NHRC report.”