Jay Lefkowitz: Requiem for a Bantamweight
To the limited degree history remembers Jay Lefkowitz at all, it should remember him as a good and well-meaning man who was unequal to the great task laid before him. I have sometimes suspected that this was the very design of those who appointed him. With the change of administrations this week, Lefkowitz departed as Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, leaving behind a final report that still clings obediently to the myth of constructive engagement with sociopaths:
The Pyongyang initiative, Lefkowitz said, “may consist of a new framework for dialogue and effective steps to interact more deeply with North Korea. This should involve a candid and ongoing human rights dialogue with Pyongyang as a condition for the future normalization of relations.”
Lefkowitz called the working group on normalization of relations, established by a February 2007 agreement at the six-party talks, a “good starting point for this discussion.” [Yonhap]
Either Lefkowitz is still toeing the line of a Secretary of State who hushed him and held him in public contempt or he still doesn’t get it. To the North Koreans, constructive engagement means about as much as it does in your average prison holding cell. In principle, however, he is correct that money is the best lever to force the regime to modify its behavior. It’s just that Lefkowitz doesn’t dare advocate a sufficiently aggressive approach:
Lefkowitz proposed that the U.S. and its allies cooperate closely to link any aid to North Korea with human rights improvements. Such aid would include development assistance, World Bank loans, trade access and food.
“When countries provide unilateral aid to North Korea, it is easier for Pyongyang to resist monitoring,” he said. “If aid donors could be syndicated and would agree to offer large amounts of humanitarian assistance to North Korea contingent on full access and monitoring, Pyongyang might feel impelled to accept.”
“Were this to happen, the misery of the North Korean people could be partially alleviated in a way that does not strengthen the regime,” he added.
By the end of 2007, the U.S. and Korean press were paying noticeably less attention to his testimony and his conferences. Not surprisingly, the more unconditional concessions the State Department offered and the less it said about North Korea’s atrocities, the more atrocities it committed. Yet even as the State Department sidelined him from its policymaking, its talks with the North Koreans, and the public face of U.S. government policy, Lefkowitz somehow clung to the belief that he still mattered. What else could have kept him from resigning?
Christopher Hill, U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July that he would invite Lefkowitz, to attend “all future negotiations with North Korea, except those specifically dealing with nuclear disarmament.”
His assurances cleared the way for some reluctant Republican senators to approve the nomination of Kathleen Stephens as the first female U.S. ambassador to Seoul.
The irony is that by renouncing the policies of the president who appointed him, he could have mattered. Certainly Lefkowitz owed Condi Rice no great debt of respect.
What will happen to the Special Envoy’s position now? (I know — the position title has recently been changed. I just don’t care.) The rumor in Washington today is that the Democrats plan to dual-hat the position with that of the nuclear negotiator, meaning that a person of Chris Hill’s inclination would have the deference to discuss human rights as little as he chooses. If that is so, we can be fairly certain that human rights will never be mentioned in any place where the North Koreans might hear.
I wonder — if it would be worthwhile to do something like — insist the walls and wire and other devices around the concentration camps should be torn down as a sign of human rights progress as well as pushing for nuclear dismantlement?
The concentration camps are something ever person in the world with internet access can see – like OFK has shown with his excellent use of Google Earth.
If any US or other democratic administration really cares about human rights, when the get into negotiations with Pyongyang, why not call for verifiable dismantling of the infrastructure of these city-sized death camps?
That is something we could monitor from afar much better than the nuclear programs:
We can’t tell what is going on inside the buildings still standing at nuke sites – nor peer inside thick mountains where stuff is hidden.
But its a lot harder to hide concentration camps and the necessary things to keep prisoners locked up in such a large land area….
usinkorea, Has it has occurred to you that the North Koreans could slaughter some of the excess population in the camps and give us quite a show? It’s been done before. As rumors about the Holocaust began to leak out of Nazi-occupied Europe, the Nazis spruced up the Theriesenstadt camp and brought in the Danish Red Cross to inspect it. Their deception was such a success that Goebbels decided to make this film. The Germans forced a Jewish prisoner and film director to make it, then gassed him and his entire family afterward. Theriesenstadt, you see, was a collection point where people were kept relatively comfortable before they were sent to Auschwitz.
If the North Koreans did the same, I have no doubt that the Korea Society, the State Department, John Feffer, etc., would believe every word of it. I’m not sure I know how we get in there without unintentionally provoking mass slaughter. I believe that the inspection of the camps must happen only after the regime abandons terror as a method of governance, or else we’ll only be allowed to see deceptions. I always come back to the conclusion that the regime must go first, and then we have to be ready to provide relief supplies.
No. That hadn’t occurred to me.
I’m not sure how much could be hidden in this time period and with the latest surveillance equipment — due to the number of camps and their size.
What it would take, however, at minimum, if possible at all – technically speaking, would be a will within the State Department, US government, and others to put the North to the test — to be willing to publicized what is known about the camps and keep up the pressure.
If the government had the will to put its resources into pressing NK about the camps, I wonder what could be done?
I don’t think the State Department would believe every word of the North. It would either choose to knowingly bury its head in the sand and not put necessary intel assets on the job to avoid finding out what is going on – and/or – it would go along with a lie in preference to “other issues” —
— with that last being exactly what it has done the last few years and actually the last couple of US administrations.
Nukes and regime survival have been much more important in even the rhetoric of US NK policy.
But, does it have to be that way? Could effective pressure be put on NK on the human rights front? I would think it could, given the size of the problem and today’s technology (and human resources we might work with) —- if there was a will to do so.
I don’t think NK could hide a mass slaughter — not without the will to not know on the part of the US.
And any mass slaughter could be used to put more pressure on the regime —- which is why the US and other concerned powers don’t want to touch human rights in the first place —— they don’t want world opinion coming into play.
They know the more the world knows about the North, the harder it will be for them to at least maintain the minimum needed to keep the regime alive and allow them to focus solely on the nuclear issue. They don’t want to talk about human rights in part, I believe, because they know the issue is so bad, so compelling, that if it caught the interest of the public – it would make their ability to fund the North at the minimum necessary for survival untenable.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better dialogue than what I have just read here – usinkorea, you are right on the money about so many things – and of course, Joshua, you must have heard about NK’s large dam-like structure near camp no. 18 which would accomodate those victims of a mass slaughter; but I tend to agree with usinkorea who maintains that our intel assets, (unlike during WWII), would prevent NK from hiding a mass slaughter and that we, the US (still the world’s best democracy for others to emulate) can put NK to the test by being willing to publicize what is known about the camps and keep up the pressure.
I don’t think any of us would disagree with N.C. Heikin’s astonishment that world opinion has not arisen in outrage against the concentration camps. Her focus on the people who risk their lives, fleeing the evil regime and the need to focus our efforts on supporting them by communicating to the average citizen on the street, which “Kimjongilia” addresses and to an extent, the blockbuster hit, “Gran Torino” does as well (I may be biased as I’ve always maintained Clint Eastwood was on the cutting edge of things, beyond our time) is not unlike what usinkorea posted about on this blog over two years ago (see Camp 22).
Any ideas as to how President Obama, who advocates a bipartisan approach to NK and a new era, should move forward, promulgating a policy that actually works? Or has anyone considered the Secretary of State, herself, Hillary Clinton, as the ultimate “Special Envoy” to implement our new strategy (or am I biased because I was inspired by her speech to thousands of Chinese in Beijing, saying that “women’s rights are human rights”). Please do tell.