The Peace of the Grave

It’s another failing grade for those who administer the “Global Test” — a group of Nobel Peace Prize laureates gathered in Kwangju at the invitation of Roh Moo Hyun and Kim Dae Jung, and returned the favor by calling on the U.S. to “ease up” on North Korea. I searched for the full text of their statement and found none, perhaps because no one outside South Korea really cares about a join statement by a huddle of sanctimonious has-beens. This forces me to rely on the media reports, which go like this…

The group called on North Korea to return to the stalled six-party nuclear talks and for it to “completely abandon its nuclear weapons policy and accept international inspectors,” it said in a statement.

“We also call for the U.S. to end financial and economic sanctions on the DPRK and offer security guarantees,” it said.

and this…

The five individual winners of the prize and representatives of five honored organizations appealed in their statement for North Korea to end its boycott of talks about its nuclear ambitions. Two other organizations, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Red Cross international committee, said their charters forbade them to join.

The signers asked North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programs and submit to international verification that it had done so. They also asked the United States to lift its economic sanctions on the North and guarantee its security.

The declaration proposed that the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas be turned into a peace park and, for good measure, that the six-party talks on North Korean nuclear ambitions, now stalled, be turned into a multilateral consulting body to promote peace and democracy on the peninsula.

How nice. Now, for a list of items the belaureled ones did not call for:

– Closure of the concentration camps and the release of the 200,000 inmates, starting with the kids held there.

– An end to the ethnic cleansing of babies.

– A full international investigation of the gas chambers in which whole families are allegedly killed; full North Korean cooperation with the same.

– An end to the political cleansing of North Koreans who the regime refuses to feed (death toll: 2 million and counting), and a halt in international sales of weapons and luxury goods to the North until it can feed its people.

– An end to the killing of political and religious dissidents.

– An end to China’s flouting of the Refugee Convention by repatriating starving and exploited North Korean refugees to imprisonment and death.

The failure to do so could reasonably cause one to question just what kind of peace the laureates and the judges who elected them are really seeking. What a lost opportunity to actually ease the suffering of these people. A shallow, feel-good proposal like this, one so thoroughly proven by experience to enable, vindicate, and exacerbate the North’s brutality, can only be grounded in a selfish clinging to lost importance.

Recently, the Nobel Peace Prize is increasingly purchased in one of two ways: through temporary strategic abstentions from mass murder (Mihkhail Gorbachev, Yasser Arafat, Le Duc Tho), and for paying a tyrant’s ransom to murderers in exchange for illusory promises of abstention (Kim Dae Jung, Mohammad El Baradei, Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger), knowing full well that the proceeds will finance the next round of slaughter.