Suzanne Scholte: A War Crimes Tribunal for North Korea

With the mounting evidence that Kim Jong Il won’t burden this world for long, the civilized world faces the prospect of inheriting jurisdiction over people who’ve done some pretty awful things:

On a recent trip to Seoul, a North Korean mother told me she and her 14-year-old daughter fled North Korea but were separated in China. The mother waited in China to reunite with her daughter only to discover that Chinese security agents had forced the girl back to North Korea, where border guards beat her to death.

It is hard to conceive of human beings who are capable of killing a 14-year-old girl simply for fleeing with her mother in search of a better life. Yet these same monsters are continuing this brutality in detention centers and political prison camps all over North Korea. What can a civilized society do to stop the atrocities being committed right now against the North Korean people by the Kim Jong Il regime?  [Suzanne Scholte, Asian Wall Street Journal]

Scholte’s idea is to recalibrate the balance of fear, which currently consists only of the fear that enforces the obedience of Kim Jong Il’s executioner.  To this, Scholte would add the countervailing fear of facing a tribunal, at least for at least those who go beyond the call of duty in their brutality (and even in North Korea, I suspect one could get away with not beating a children to death).  She goes on to express her belief that “reform-minded potential leaders who would oppose Mr. Kim” are waiting behind the wings in Pyongyang.  As much as I like and respect Suzanne, I’m no more convinced of this when she says it than when Selig Harrison does, though discounting Selig Harrison is never a bad default position to start from.

I agree, however, with the broader principle that people who fear consequences will moderate their brutality, if the consequences they fear are severe enough.  We saw some evidence of this in the last days of World War Two, when the approach of the Russian hangman inspired SS guards to flee Mauthausen without killing its prisoners.  I’m skeptical of any reformist faction in North Korea, but I am a believer in the power of self-interest to influence people at key moments.
As much as I look forward to the tribunals — though I doubt the Chinese will hold them — there’s something else I look forward to even more:  the furious opposition of all the editorial writers at the Hankyoreh and OhMyNews who so recently supporting bringing the descendants of Japanese collaborators before Maoist “Truth Commissions,” which had the power to expropriate land.

In the end, if post-revolutionary North Korea is as chaotic as I expect it to be, the North Koreans themselves will “take care” of many of these prosecutions without the procedural complexity of tribunals.  Many other future former regime figures will spend their lives looking over their shoulders for those they’d oppressed, and we can look forward to at least a generation of class warfare between the people who are now rice eaters, those who are now corn-eaters, and those who now forage for whatever they can, the grass-eaters.