The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (and How You Can Help)

I’m very glad I took Dan B’s advice and attended the presentation on the North Korean Database Center (NKDB) for Human Rights. The event was held at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, last Thursday. NKDB founders Kim Sang Hun and Yoon Yeo Sang gave the presentation.

The NKDB has created an extensive database of alleged human rights abuses in North Korea, one that is both comprehensive and subject to detailed statistical analysis for journalists, policymakers, and perhaps one day, prosecutors.

North Korea isn’t as isolated as it once was, a change I attribute to the collapse of North Korea’s post-Soviet economy, the resulting famine, and the flight of hundreds of thousands of people who risked their lives to cross the border into China to find food. Some returned to describe what they’d seen in China, some defected to describe what they’d survive, and plenty did not survive at all. But enough people have survived to tell their stories, particularly the nearly 17,000 North Koreans now living in South Korea. As early as May of 2003, when the NKDB was first created, the sheer volume of hideous things these people were telling us was already more than one newspaper, white paper, or blog could document usefully. It was all too anecdotal for statistically useful analysis. That is why the NKDB was created, and why it is so important. The project receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, which Kim gratefully acknowledged.

The NKDB is unquestionably dedicated to supporting the human rights of the North Korean people by spreading awareness of their condition, but in doing so, its founders emphasize independence, accuracy, and credibility. As with the annual human rights white papers they produce, they reduce subjective observations to an absolute minimum and relay on objective statistics only.

Kim and Yoon rolled off a list of statistics — as of May 2009, the database included data from interviews with 5,092 witnesses and described 11,206 cases going all the way back to the 1950’s. The NKDB had interviewed an additional 3,300 witnesses whose information was not recorded in the database because their testimonies had not yet been analyzed, due to lack of sufficient NKDB staff (Yoon, who was speaking at the time, did not specify whether the analysis had to do with witness credibility or other criteria).

Data collected are carefully categories by type of information: interviews and inquiries, written materials and publications, internet data, photographs and video footage, and tools — specifically, actual tools of torture, which the NKDB is somehow able to obtain.

The alleged violations are classified into, and coded according to, 16 different categories of human rights violations that occur frequently and reflect the actual conditions inside North Korea. These include arbitrary detention, and violations of the right to life, personal integrity and liberty (comprising 60% of the total), survival, health, education, and freedom of movement. Within the 16 categories are 84 subcategories, 104 components, and 191 indicators of violations. Violations are also coded according to the source, most of it from victims, but in 742 cases, from the perpetrators themselves.

The analysis shows some trends about the regime’s repressive behavior. The most violations occurred at detention facilities, and most (3,772) were inflicted in response to an actual or attempted border crossing. Other political offenses gave rise of 2,101 violations, felony offenses gave rise to 1,582, economic crimes led to 298, misdemeanor offenses 786, guilt by association 826, and all others 1,063. Collectively, Kim and Yoon believe they show the world’s most severe and broadest range of human rights violations for the longest period of time in history, and against what is possibly the largest number of victims. The trends and testimonies suggest little chance of voluntary improvement in these conditions.

There are obvious limits to the analytical value of such statistics, coming from such an opaque society, which Kim and Yoon readily acknowledged. For example, their analysis shows that a vast majority of the incidents had occurred since the 1990’s, but this is probably as much a reflection of when North Korea ceased to be an escape-proof prison as of a rise in the regime’s brutality. The largest number of recorded incident were noted in North Hamgyeong Province, a likely case of sampling bias because the province is close to the Chinese border and famine-prone.

NKDB’s web site is here, but if you go there now, you’ll find it under construction, and the database, data, and testimonies are all in Korean. That was not the original plan, and Kim (who spoke in English) ardently hopes to translate the database into English, and hopes that volunteers will step forward to help. If you’re interested in volunteering, you can contact Kim at nkdbi@hanmail.net.

When Kim and Yoon concluded, Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch spoke briefly. What little work Human Rights Watch has done on North Korea — particularly the work of Kay Seok — has been good. Amnesty International, in contrast, has done almost nothing of value on this issue in the last five years. But Human Rights Watch has been guilty of a disproportionate focus on Gitmo and Gaza, where the alleged violations are on a fraction of the scale and severity of those alleged to be occurring in North Korea, and where there’s far less moral clarity when the acts that bring down HRW’s wrath are openly debated in a democratic system, and when they’re ultimately done to protect civilian life from terrorist acts (and when did you last see HRW call a press conference to condemn the terrorist mass murder of Al Qaeda, the repressive brutality of the Taliban, or Hamas for rocketing civilians in Israel?)

Ms. Richardson’s remarks often sounded like a case of “do as I say, not as I do,” but some of what she said was correct. She criticized the State Department’s approach to the human rights issue, accusing it of viewing it as “a complicated irritant” distracting it from the nuclear issue, and calling the U.S. government’s performance on admitting North Korean refugees “appalling.” Ms. Richardson complained that even in japan, nobody was terribly interested in talking about the human rights of anyone but Japanese abductees. The insufficiency of attention on the atrocities in North Korea isn’t because the world cares less about North Koreans, according to Richardson, so much as a series of complicated dynamics. First, other countries have only the narrowest relationships with North Korea, none of which (for obvious reasons) relates to a discussion of human rights. Second is the absence of information about North Korea, where there are no (living) dissidents or latent reformers. There is no one we can talk to.

This is a cop-out. There are pressure points that Human Rights Watch could press if it had the will, if it approached this issue with a proportionate sense of outrage. The first of these is North Korea’s mission to the U.N., which HRW ought to make a focus of demonstrations and street theater, demanding that North Korea’s standing in the U.N. be suspended until it allows regular Red Cross visits to all of its concentration and labor camps. The second is China, whose interrogation and processing centers for North Korean refugees should also be subject to regular Red Cross visits. The third is the U.N. Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, who built his career around appeasing North Korea and ignoring this issue. The best thing to be said for Ban is that he’s a spineless moral coward who who bends in any strong wind. If HRW mobilized pressure, Ban would act proportionally to it. HRW doesn’t act because too much of its membership doesn’t want to talk about human rights violations by anyone else who might hate America (in general) and George W. Bush (in particular) as much as they do.

To Ms. Richardson, that highlighted the importance of the NKDB project and the detailed data it records — above all to arm policymakers and U.N. officials, or failing that, to put them on notice of what they were failing to act on. Richardson noted that North Korea is coming up for “universal periodic review” in the U.N. Human Rights Council (in my own view, a failed and worthless body that is exceedingly unlikely to do anything effective). Then, data like these should be collected with a view toward accountability, eventually, to make the legal case when the perpetrators face prosecution (at the Hague, presumably, where the accused would live and eat better than many of them do now?). Finally, Richardson stated that if some of the victims in the gulags have some sense that people outside are following and documenting their fate, that would provide some hope and inspiration (and how likely is that?). Richardson seemed to approach this topic with good intentions and very little understanding. But the NKDB project does matter if it can influence policies in South Korea, the United States, and elsewhere through public opinion.

There was short time for questions when the presentations ended, and I can’t fail to note this bizarre question the local representative of Good Friends: she asked whether, if North Korea’s human rights violations are made an issue at the six-party talks, why the North Koreans should not be allowed to bring up human rights violations anywhere else on earth, too. The same might as well be said of the nuclear programs of India, Pakistan, and Syria. Why not bring those up? The answer is that these are talks that focus on North Korea and specific problems where ordinary international institutions have completely failed to dialogue with or influence North Korea. The other five parties to the talks are either non-nuclear states, members of the NPT in good standing, or both. Certainly international institutions have no access to or influence on human rights violations in China — nor do they have much interest in exercising any — in which case, maybe there ought to be another set of talks about closing down the Laogai and relaxing the repression in Tibet and Xinjiang. God knows there has been no shortage of discussion about Gitmo or regular visits there by the Red Cross, U.N. mucketymucks, and politicians. Good Friends does some good work and provides regular interesting reporting from inside North Korea. But with apologies to the questioner, it must be the dumbest question I’ve heard all year.

I want to end with one last request for your assistance. Speaking with Mr. Kim of NKDB after the presentation, I spoke to him about my search for North Korean witnesses to corroborate or correct information I had collected about sites in North Korea on Google Earth, particularly labor and concentration camps. He expressed interest in working together, beginning with a request to find the site of a camp called “Jeung-San” along North Korea’s west coast. Mr. Kim said that the torture occurring there is the most ghastly he’s heard of anywhere in North Korea today, and he’d like to find satellite imagery of the place. In the limited time I’ve had to search, I was unable to find it. The site is apparently built in a non-traditional penitentiary style with walls and towers, but Mr. Kim mentioned that it had round walls (?) and was near a military site (but near the coastline west of Pyongyang, what isn’t?). If anyone can find a place matching that description, I’d appreciate if you’d forward an image or a kml file. Here is the approximate location:

Good luck.