Can peer pressure do what South Korea’s conscience couldn’t?

Did the U.N. have to care about human rights in North Korea first for South Koreans to care, too? What is it about Michael Kirby that gives him the capacity to move the South Korean government that, say, Ban Ki Moon, Park Geun Hye, and Moon Jae In all lack? Assuming that anything can make a majority of South Koreans give a damn about North Koreans, what would that say about Korean society and its leaders?

South Korea’s unification minister appealed to lawmakers Wednesday to pass a bill on North Korea’s human rights abuse, citing the need for a legal basis for “systemic” efforts to address the problem.

The legislation, if adopted, would give a ray of hope to North Korean people, said Ryoo Kihl-jae, Seoul’s point man on Pyongyang.

“If the North Korea human rights bills are enacted through a compromise between the ruling and opposition parties, the government will draw up a basic plan to improve North Korea’s human rights conditions on the basis of that,” Ryoo said at a forum here on reunification.

The Park Geun-hye administration will also make concrete efforts in cooperation with civic groups in South Korea and the international community to deal with the matter, he added. [Yonhap]

Some day, I’d like to read a coherent and credible description of what the two competing bills actually do, something that Yonhap’s article doesn’t really offer. Here are the passages that really intrigued (and bothered) me:

It would help send a clear message not only to Pyongyang but also to the world that Seoul is not sitting idle over the suffering of people in the North, said Ryoo.

His call came as the National Assembly has launched formal discussions on a pair of long-pending bills — one proposed by the ruling Saenuri Party and another proposed by the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy.

The move was apparently prompted by a U.N. panel’s decision to put a fresh resolution against Pyongyang to a vote at the General Assembly. It calls for a referral of the North’s leaders to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

It would be maddening to think that Koreans need foreign affirmation or peer pressure to act to assist their northern kindred, but President Park–never a strong human rights advocate before–is also climbing on the bandwagon:

President Park Geun-hye called on officials Tuesday to make aggressive efforts to help improve the lives of North Koreans as she made clear that North Korea’s human rights issue is a top priority in dealing with the communist country.

The issue of the North’s human rights had long been placed on the back burner in South Korea where many people, mostly liberals, have shied away from the issue out of fear that it could strain inter-Korean relations.

The issue was also pushed back on the priority list as South Korea mainly focused on diplomatic solutions with the United States and other regional powers to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs.

On Tuesday, Park made it clear that the North’s nuclear and human rights issues are “our core agenda in our policy toward North Korea.

“We should not be passive in these issues out of fear of North Korea’s backlash,” Park said in a Cabinet meeting, a comment that marked a clear departure from her liberal predecessors who rarely spoke about the human rights issue as they sought reconciliation with North Korea. [….]

Park also called for efforts to ensure a bill meant to improve North Korea’s dismal human rights record wins parliamentary endorsement.

Park’s comments came days after she used her high-profile address to the U.N. General Assembly to try to galvanize international efforts to improve North Korea’s human rights record. [Yonhap]

For more analysis on the psychology of South Koreans’ ambivalence (or apathy) about the North, I’ll point you to a 2010 Brian Myers op-ed about Koreans’ non-reaction to the Cheonan incident. Although Myers’s observations fit with my own, the data show that after the incidents of 2010, public opinion in South Korea did turn significantly against Pyongyang. Two more recent surveys show that more than 90% of South Koreans don’t trust North Korea, and 70% think reunification is necessary, despite the fact that just one-third think it will benefit them personally. Tellingly, however, respondents picked ethnic identity as the most important reason for reunification.

On somewhat related topics, Stephen Denney analyzes the evolving politics of pro-North Korean activism here (see also my 2006 interview with Han Ki-Hong of the Daily NK; much more here), and The Interpreter talks about the continued anti-Americanism of South Korean films (which I discussed in this post).

Still, opinion is not the same thing as intensity. What I’ve never understood about public opinion in Korea is how it selects the issues it seizes on, clasps close to its heart, and even expects others to clasp close to theirs (for a superb article on this topic, see this article, in The Washington City Paper, by a young Korean-American writer). I can understand the contemporary relevance of the comfort women issue, but only if it’s ultimately about protecting the rights and dignity of women now, such as the North Korean refugee women in China. I can understand how Tokdo might raise real issues of preserving territorial integrity, but only as an issue secondary to reclaiming North Korea (and I certainly won’t hear anything about Tokdo from people who wanted, functionally, to give away Korean waters in the Yellow Sea).

What Koreans must understand is that if they’re going to persuade foreign audiences about the things they care the most deeply about, those issues won’t make sense to any foreign observer if North Korea isn’t among them.