Ban Ki Moon Is to Human Rights What Roman Polanski Is to Child Welfare

It was a horror that came from within, that consumed and devastated entire communities and families. It was a horror that left you as survivors of a trauma which to the world beyond your borders was unimaginable, even though we all now know it happened.We will not pretend to know how you must overcome the unimaginable. We can only offer, in humility, the hope and the prayer that you will overcome — and the pledge that we stand prepared to help you recover. We must and we do acknowledge that the world failed Rwanda at that time of evil. The international community and the United Nations could not muster the political will to confront it. The world must deeply repent this failure.

– Kofi Annan, Apology before the Rwandan Parliament, May 18, 1998

I would like to propose that we all dispense with the words “never again,” unless they are used with irony.  Whether the point passed at Rwanda or in the U.N. “safe area” in Srebrenica, the U.N. has long since lost its credibility as a remotely effective protector of the victims of mass murder.  To relegate humanity’s most important self-policing role to a conniving and feckless milquetoast like Ban Ki-Moon is the functional equivalent of putting Roman Polanski in charge of a girl scout camp — the sort of grossly negligent abdication that bears its own culpability.

Ban could clear the field for more effective action if he’d get his apology to the North Korean people over with now.  Note, for example, the rich contrasts in tone and substance between (a) Vitit Muntarbhorn’s latest report on human rights in North Korea, and (b) Ban Ki Moon’s watered-down version.  Money quote from Muntarbhorn:

“The country is not poor, and yet the money is not spent on the people.”

His report is a valuable document with regard to those topics it chooses to mention, such as the regime’s denial of peoples’ right to be fed, or to feed themselves.  He notes that hunger is worsening because of “the negative role of the authorities,” specifically, its attempts to reconstitute the state’s monopoly on food distribution, the discriminatory manner in which that system denies many of the people even a starvation ration, its refusal to accept American food aid, and its crackdown on markets and private plot farming.  Several of these points are particularly telling:  wouldn’t a government that’s interested in increasing the aggregate available food supply let in as much foreign food aid as it can get, and encourage people to cultivate more land, at least in their free time?  The implication is that the regime is less interested in making more food available than in keeping the people hungry enough to control them, or worse.

The authorities are now compelling the population to obtain grain and other produce directly from State-run stores. There have been various protests by traders against that diktat.

Separately, Muntarbhorn elaborated on this points before the media:

Nearly 40 percent of North Koreans are starving, and a shortfall in international aid means that a fraction of those people will receive food donations, a U.N. rights expert said.  The World Food Programme will be able to reach fewer than 2 million of the communist country’s 9 million hungry people, ….  Aid has been limited by global reaction to North Korea’s recent nuclear and missile tests and the government’s priorities are misguided, he said.

“The country is not poor, and yet the money is not spent on the people,” Muntarbhorn told reporters Thursday after delivering his latest report before the U.N. General Assembly. “People should be entitled to a fair share of the budget and the benefits from trade in terms of access to sustainable development.” [CNN]

Muntarbhorn noted that North Korea has more natural resources than the South and had exports worth seven billion dollars last year (he did not give a source for his statistics, or break down what percentage of those statistics were lawful or permissible under UNSCR 1874, but I digress). Muntarbhorn also describes the ill-treatment of women, the suppression of any unauthorized information, and excessive restrictions on the delivery of food aid. And elsewhere, we learn that the regime’s suppression of religion remains absolute, though that’s really a subset of the regime’s smothering of free speech and thought.Much more goes unsaid.  The most conspicuous omission is that Muntarbhorn references North Korea’s concentration camps in passing, but says next to nothing about the scale of that system, the number of prisoners they hold, who the prisoners are, or the conditions the prisoners endure.  Distressingly, Muntarbhorn does not call for international access to the camps, the release of even the child prisoners there, or for an investigation into allegations that chemical weapons are tested on political prisoners, along with their wives and children.

If I were sufficiently capitalized to do it, I could raise a small fortune betting against liberal internationalists that the U.N. will continue to make a mockery of its founding charter and do nothing whatsoever about any of this. In one sense, parody does not not do justice to this reality:

Muntarbhorn, who has been denied access to North Korea for six years, described a downturn of human rights in that society, saying that North Koreans live in constant fear of abduction, arrest, abuse and even public execution.

Got that? Kim Jong Il hasn’t even let Muntarbhorn into his entire kingdom without drawing so much as an angry letter.

There is even less substance in Ban’s report, which says so little about conditions in North Korea itself that you can almost wonder what the purpose of the report is, other than a C.Y.A. for Ban’s memoirs.  Certainly Ban can’t actually believe the North Koreans will be persuaded by anything he says.  Certainly he isn’t marshaling support for Chapter VII sanctions.  Instead, Ban mostly recounts of how North Korea has refused to cooperate with Muntarbhorn in any way, and how it has shown a middle finger to the U.N.’s resolutions on human rights.  What’s also clear, though not stated, is that China has been almost as uncooperative:

18. The Special Rapporteur visited two countries neighbouring the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Korea (27-31 October 2008) and Japan (23-28 January 2009), to gather information on the human rights situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea from a variety of Government, civil society and other interlocutors. He highlighted the unresolved issue of persons abducted by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as well as the protection needs of those fleeing from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the issue of family reunion.

There isn’t a word in Ban’s report so much as mildly criticizing China for its noncooperation with Muntarbhorn, or with the UNHCR, or for its repeated and flagrant violations of the U.N. Convention on Refugees, which China signed.  All of this only makes sense if Ban’s critics are right that he’s China’s lap dog.  Fine, but then does Ban deserve the forgiveness — much less the vain and uncritical praise — that he receives from Koreans?

But that isn’t the real howler here:

[Muntarbhorn] urged the U.N. Security Council to step up as North Koreans face worsening conditions.

The United Nations regards the North Korean government as one of the most restrictive and repressive in the world. The Security Council has slapped the reclusive nation with multiple sanctions, though the United Nations does not tend to intervene in a country’s humanitarian affairs.

“Let’s make good use of the international system,” Muntarbhorn urged. “I need the Security Council.”

It is as if Ban’s report is not already an answer to Muntarbhorn’s call.  I hate to demean a good man who means well, but Muntarbhorn’s suggestion is so absurd as to verge on the hallucinogenic. The U.N. has failed the people of North Korea, and that’s not about to change now. After all, Muntarbhorn is directing this call to an organization led by Ban Ki Moon, a meek and pliable floater of a man who built his career on saying as little as possible about atrocities in North Korea, who was the foreign minister of South Korea as its U.N. Ambassador abstained from a series of U.N. resolutions condemning North Korea’s crimes against humanity that were then well known, when other men were then facing international war crimes tribunals for similar things.  Ban did not squeak out a single word of protest against those crimes against humanity.  Rather, as Foreign Minister, he facilitated them by defending South Korea’s provision of billions of dollars in regime-sustaining aid to Kim Jong Il.  We will never know how many North Koreans died before firing squads, in concentration camps, or of starvation in the years when South Korean money paid sustained that oppressive system.

Worse, Muntarbhorn is addressing a Security Council where North Korea’s primary backer and sometime-puppetmaster — the oxymoron known as the Peoples’ Republic of China — holds veto power.  China has been shielding North Korea from accountability for anything for years.  The Security Council will not act.  Diplomats, international institutions, and a Human Rights Industry that hungers only for low-hanging fruit have neither the will nor the means to close down North Korea’s death camps.  Only guns can do that, whether through a coup, or a long, slow rebellion that bleeds the regime to death or forces it to change to win over the support of the population.

At times, I incline to the view that the world is better off with a U.N. that’s paralyzed and sliding gradually into disuse.  If so, Ban is the perfect Secretary General.  But it still frustrates me that so much expense is being poured into an institution that was designed to stop things like this, but which has proven so woefully ineffective at it, and by the design of much of its membership.  That’s what happens whenever you form an organization without any standards for membership.

Related:   It may be business as usual at the South Korean Consulate in Shenyang, which specializes in turning away North and South Koreans escaping from “the warm care of a relevant organ,” but at least South Korea will vote for an irrelevant U.N. resolution condemning North Korea’s human rights record.