U.N. Commissioner: N. Korean atrocities unlike any since the Khmer Rouge, Nazis

Reader Chris Beaumont* emailed me yesterday to draw my attention to the web site of the U.N. Commission on Inquiry on human rights abuses in North Korea. On this page, you can find links to videos of all of the Commission’s hearings in Seoul (English and Korean) and Tokyo (English and Japanese). I haven’t had time to review the complete record, but in this one, Shin Dong Hyok testifies about Camp 14 with the aid of Google Earth imagery.

There are 21 of these videos. If you find watching all of them to be more vicarious misery than you can take, you may accept Commissioner Michael Kirby’s summary of the hearings instead:

“They are representative of large-scale patterns that may constitute systematic and gross human rights violations,” he said as part of the panel’s preliminary report.

He added the testimonies gave “a face and voice to great human suffering”.

[….]

He added: “All in all it is a very horrifying story, the like of which I don’t think I’ve seen or read of since the Khmer Rouge [in Cambodia] and the Nazi atrocities during the second world war.” [BBC]

On the other hand, if you’re one of those who’s tempted to call Kirby’s comparisons overwrought or premature, then you’re required to watch all 21 hearings (there will be a test). There is, after all, a merit-based corollary to Godwin’s Law just for cases like this.

I’ll allow that Kirby was barely six years old when Russian soldiers entered the Führerbunker, and that presumably, he didn’t see any Nazi atrocities. His Wikipedia bio doesn’t indicate that he has any personal experience in Cambodia, either, but I’ll assume that he’s well-read on both situations.

I was more interested in Kirby’s background, which is admittedly lean in the field of international human rights law, but does reveal some interesting views that most Americans would associate with classical liberalism, including his open advocacy of judicial activism (most judges are closet judicial activists) and the fact that Kirby is just as openly gay. Judge Kirby’s gay rights advocacy may be his main claim to experience in the field of human rights law–and no, gay rights probably isn’t one of the top five human rights issues in North Korea today–but I see nothing to criticize in his performance as Commissioner. So far, Kirby seems to be doing his job very well. A resume isn’t everything.

The Commission’s work deserves to be big news, and fortunately, it is. We know this not only because so many newspapers have covered it, but also because it’s a sure thing that a story about human rights in North Korea is too big to ignore when even the AP covers it.

It also heard from a young woman who said she saw another female prisoner forced to drown her own baby in a bucket, Kirby said, and a man who said he was forced to help collect and burn the corpses of prisoners who died of starvation.  [AP]

Even if you allow for some exaggerations and memory lapses in the testimony–I’ve never tried a case that didn’t have some inconsistencies in the testimony–the evidence collected from thousands of eyewitnesses and corroborated with extrinsic evidence (such as satellite imagery) proves, beyond a reasonable doubt, that North Korea has, as a matter of national policy, committed crimes against humanity that are comparable to some of those committed by the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge (as I’ve said before, Yodok is not Auschwitz but Mauthausen).

By now, about 25,000 North Koreans have escaped to South Korea, and the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, among others, is cataloguing their testimony and even subjecting it to statistical analysis. Thousands more North Koreans have been interviewed in China and described their knowledge of the systemic denial of food and medical care, the regime’s policy of racially motivated infanticide, widespread and severe use of torture, and horrific conditions of detention.

Of course, the best way to test the veracity of testimony is with impeachment through cross-examination or rebuttal, but that won’t happen here, because North Korea refuses to respond to the charges or cooperate with the inquiry, and no apologist has enough access to the evidence to even offer a defense. Instead, North Korea dismisses all of the testimony as fabricated, part of a U.S.-orchestrated smear campaign. To believe that, of course, you have to believe that thousands of North Koreans are lying.

“The commission invited the authorities of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to attend the public hearings in Seoul and make representations, but received no reply,” Kirby said.

“Instead, its official news agency attacked the testimony we heard as ‘slander’ against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, put forward by ‘human scum.'”

In a June 19 dispatch, the KCNA news agency also denounced the witnesses as “wild dogs in human form” who had become “the main player in the confrontation farce under the patronage of the south Korean puppet group and brigandish U.S. imperialists.”  [AP]

There’s that word again. Take a drink, but only after you’ve noted that the AP does not disclose its own business and “journalistic” partnership with KCNA in its coverage of KCNA’s statement.

North Korea on Tuesday rejected the findings of a U.N. human rights inquiry as part of a political plot “fabricated and invented by forces hostile” to Pyongyang.

North Korean ambassador So Se Pyong, addressing the U.N. Human Rights Council, said: “Such a mechanism is only a product of politicisation of human rights on the part of the EU and Japan in alliance with the U.S. hostile policy against the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea).”  [Reuters]

Sometimes, I wonder whether the North Koreans have ever met anyone in the U.S. State Department. I loved Kirby’s response:

“An ounce of evidence is worth far more than many pounds of insults and baseless attacks,” Kirby told the 47-nation Council based in Geneva which is the U.N.’s top human rights body. “So far, however, the evidence we have heard has largely pointed in one direction — and evidence to the contrary is lacking.” [AP]

The Commission will issue its final report next March. North Korea’s non-response obviously carries little weight with Kirby, and its non-cooperation shouldn’t interfere with the legitimacy of the findings. In the U.S. legal system, and in Australia’s, when a party to a proceeding hides evidence from the tribunal, the tribunal is entitled to draw an adverse inference about what the non-cooperative party is hiding. Similarly, when a party simply fails to appear to contest legal proceedings, the tribunal will consider the evidence that’s submitted and enter judgment, including judgment by default. Even in criminal cases, a fugitive defendant can be tried and convicted in absentia. There’s no reasonable doubt that North Korea is lying.

Aside from scaring away a few image-conscious investors and exacerbating Dennis Rodman’s image problem, none of this testimony will achieve anything more than reaffirming the worst we know about humanity, and also reaffirming that the rest of us haven’t learned how to confront evil effectively when the perpetrators know that we aren’t willing to use force. These atrocities will continue as long as people in South Korea, Europe, and China continue to finance their perpetuation without placing humanitarian conditions on their financial and commercial activities. North Korea will only cease these atrocities when their clear consequence is the loss of access to regime-sustaining hard currency. And as we’ve learned, North Korea has no compunction about spreading atrocities far beyond its own borders for a little more of that hard currency.

South Korea, the state with the greatest moral responsibility to present North Korea with this choice, and also the state that bears the greatest risk of being North Korea’s next external victim, appears unprepared to offer that choice. It chooses, instead, to go right on selling Kim Jong Un that rope Lenin warned us about.** Tomorrow, they will be the victims, as they were before.  For now, it’s the people of North Korea who are paying the price for the South’s moral ambiguity.

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* Chris set up the Free North Korea blog at least a decade ago, when I became a regular reader of his site. That was the spark that caused me to want to start this site, which is still going after all this time.

** I realize that the authenticity of this quote is the subject of much debate. The only one who claims to have heard it was Grigory Zinoviev, and anything he remembered ran down the floor drain of a cell in the Lubyanka during the Great Purge of ’36. The motives to deny the quote should go without saying. True or not, it encapsulates North Korea’s external economic policy perfectly.