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
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-1_19_06_RH.html