North Korea

A continuing frustration of mine is the lack of media attention to the massive human rights abuses that are being perpetrated in North Korea. Instead North Korea usually is only in the news due to its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Too often overlooked is the fact that Pyongyang is engaged in arguably the most large-scale systematic oppression of its citizens of any country in the world.

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As the North Korea Freedom Coalition notes:

"More than 200,000 prisoners are being held in just 5 of the 12 prison camps of North Korea, a nation of less than 20 million people...These camps are huge, as large as many U.S. counties. At least two of the camps are larger in area than the District of Columbia, Camp Huaong is 3 times the size of Washington, D.C."

To his credit President George W. Bush hasn't been silent on this issue and appears to recognize the evil of North Korea leader Kim Jong Il.

"I loathe Kim Jong Il,” Bush told [Washington Post journalist Bob] Woodward during an interview for the author’s book “Bush at War.” "I’ve got a visceral reaction to this guy because he is starving his people. And I have seen intelligence of these prison camps -- they’re huge -- that he uses to break up families and to torture people."

Bush again raised the issue in his press conference last week:

"Look, Kim Jong Il is a dangerous person. He's as man who starves his people. He's got huge concentration camps."

Bush, of course, then went on to press for the Six Party Talks as the key to a solution to the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula. But Kim's nuclear activities should not be the primary issue here, it should be the widespread oppression of his people. Bush should say to Kim, and the world, "Look, if you want to develop nuclear weapons, that's fine. But just know this, if you use them, or if you are caught smuggling them outside the country, you are a dead man. It's that simple."

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The U.S. has the moral high ground here, why isn't it being used? Why isn't the nuclear issue being framed in its proper context? Instead of railing against the North's reprocessing of spent fuel rods the U.S. should ask why Pyongynang is devoting so much energy to these efforts instead of its people. Just as human rights were made a centerpiece of the West's efforts against the Soviet Union during the Cold War so too should this issue be the mainstay of diplomatic efforts against Pyongyang.

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At least Christopher Hitchens isn't being reticent about what is transpiring in the Stalinist holdout:

In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. ("Hmmm … good book. Let's see if we can make it work.")

Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's dystopia. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven't already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no "free-world" propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.

Hitchens gives a little more credit to Bush than I think is due. While Bush should be applauded for his willingness to speak the truth about North Korea, his comments thus far should only be viewed as a good start. As the leader of the free world he must speak for those who have no voice.

Update: Maybe I'm being too harsh on the Bush Administration which has just named its first special envoy for human rights in North Korea.