January 21, 2006
Diverging Opinion on North Korea's Human Rights Abuses
By Richard
Halloran
Among the
policy differences dividing the United States and South Korea,
one that stands out is the divergence over the issue of North
Korea’s abuses of the human rights of its own citizens.
In the U.S.,
President Bush, both houses of Congress, and private, bipartisan
committees have condemned the North Korean abuses and have urged
the South Koreans to do likewise. The U.S. ambassador in Seoul,
Alexander Vershbow, has been particularly outspoken.
Just this
week, Vershbow chided the South Koreans for not standing up to
the North Koreans. “I think all South Koreans,” he
said, “should be worried about regime that threatens its
own people so badly, that wastes its scarce resources on nuclear
weapons, and that engages in counterfeiting, drug trafficking,
money laundering and the export of dangerous military technologies.”
Instead,
President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea, who was a human rights
lawyer before entering elective politics, has been strangely subdued
on this question. Senior officials of his government have argued
that it is better to be “prudent” than to provoke
the North Koreans with criticism. Some have demanded that the
American ambassador be recalled.
In a press
conference with President Bush during his visit to Korea in November,
President Roh asserted in a convoluted argument that his approach
on the North Korean human rights issue was similar to that of
President Lincoln in freeing the slaves during the American Civil
War.
“President
Lincoln’s first priority was unity among the states of America,”
President Roh contended in referring to reunification of divided
Korea. “I think that this is quite similar to the position
we are taking when it comes to North Korean human rights issues.”
The dispute
over how to handle this issue comes against a backdrop of rising
anti-Americanism in Korea and a nascent anti-Korean backlash in
the United States. In particular, Washington and Seoul disagree
over how to negotiate with Pyongyang on North Korea’s nuclear
ambitions, the Americans taking a hard line, the South Koreans
advocating “flexibility.”
The United
States and South Korea disagree on military matters. The South
Koreans have said they will cut their troop deployment in Iraq
by one-third this year while the Americans will move forces from
positions close to the demilitarized zone dividing the peninsula
to camps further south despite South Korean objections. Command
of Korean forces in wartime is in dispute.
Indeed, relations between Washington and Seoul have deteriorated
so much that some specialists have begun to speculate that the
alliance may be dissolved even though Presidents Bush and Roh
have proclaimed it to be in good shape. Peter Beck, a scholar
of Korea, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times: “There's
no question, if the alliance isn't managed properly, it could
easily fall apart.”
A particular
point of contention has been two reports issued by the non-profit
U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
The first,
“Hunger and Human Rights: The Politics of Famine in North
Korea,” said that one million North Koreans, or about five
percent of the nation’s population, had died of famine over
the last two decades because “the government was culpably
slow to take the necessary steps to guarantee adequate food supplies.”
Written by
Stephan Haggard of the University of California, San Diego, and
Marcus Noland of the Institute of International Economics in Washington,
D.C., the report concluded: “It is difficult to imagine
a famine of this magnitude, or chronic food shortages of this
duration, occurring in a regime that protected basic political
and civil liberties.”
President
Roh’s government objected, contending that, contrary to
the report, South Korea had monitored its food aid to North Korea
to assure that it was being distributed equitably to reach the
people who needed it. Haggard and Noland disagreed in a rebuttal.
Earlier,
the U.S. committee issued a report entitled “The Hidden
Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps.” Based
largely on information from North Korean prisoners who had defected
to South Korea, the report assessed two different systems of prisons.
One set comprised forced labor camps, the other to punish North
Koreans who had fled to China and had been returned.
Written by
David Hawk, a human rights researcher who has produced reports
on abuses in Cambodia and Rwanda, the study pointed to citizens
arrested for guilt by association and lifetime sentences for three
generations of political prisoners.
Hawk portrayed
forced abortions for pregnant women who had fled to China and
forcibly sent back to North Korea or “murder of their new
born infants.” Further, he said: “The practice of
torture permeates the North Korean prison and detention system.”
Richard Halloran, formerly
with The New York Times as a foreign correspondent in Asia and
military correspondent in Washington, writes from Honolulu. He
can be reached at oranhall@hawaii.rr.com
