Melanie Kirkpatrick, a gem of the WSJ editorial board, writes:
In the epilogue to “The Aquariums of Pyongyang,” his 2000 book about growing up in the infamous Yodok prison camp, Kang Chol-Hwan expresses his anger at the world’s indifference to the human-rights abuses in the North. “We’re told that this debate would be better left until another day,” he writes. “But by then we’ll all be dead.”
I pray Ms. Lee and Ms. Ling will come home soon. But if the Americans’ ordeal raises international awareness of the horrors of North Korea’s gulag, it will not have been in vain.
I have written this before, but such mentions are sentimental at best. As far as I can tell there is no substantial national discussion on North Korea policy, specifically on how to incorporate human rights improvements in North Korea into overall policy. Kirkpatrick’s hope is that the situation of Lee and Ling would help raise awareness and consequently public pressure for such a policy discussion to take place.
I am ambivalent about this. While I am thrilled at growing public support and awareness of North Korea’s crimes against humanity, the lack of support amongst Koreans gives me no hope. Bear with me and my loose analogy: imagine if there were another Jewish Holocaust (which is not too far fetched with anti-Semitism becoming commonplace). If American Jews and Israel were relatively silent about the deaths of millions of Jews, would governments around the world really see a political cost in not acting?
The best among us, and by that I mean those who have an unparalleled vast and nuanced knowledge of events surrounding North Korea, have made the leap from a priori notions of and faith in diplomacy to recognition of empirical evidence. They have concluded that there is an immutable correlation between how a country treats its own citizens and how it treats its neighbors, which has devastating consequences when you consider that that country is on the road to acquiring “fully operational” nuclear weapons.
Joshua Stanton of One Free Korea writes:
Brownback’s point, which was lost in the conventional narrative, was that we ignore any pathology capable of such evils at our own peril. Recently, it has become vogue not to speak of peril to the soul and the values of our nation, except perhaps in defense of Khalid Sheik Mohammad. As Hill put it, “Each country, including our own, needs to improve its human rights record.” In the event this logic has some appeal to you, it should be clear enough that ignoring these atrocities has brought us no closer to realizing our dispassionate security interests, either. Each offer of reasonable compromise we extend, each new North Korean demand to which we accede, seems only to make its regime more cruel and belligerent (The Weekly Standard).
Inexplicably, this is an unpopular and unsavory argument to put forth — history has shown that these voices were ignored until it was too late to stop the past century’s genocides and, in the case of North Korea, nuclear proliferation/bombs going off.
