But the UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) has provided an unprecedented platform from which to discuss the issue of human rights abuse in North Korea — and there are hopes that this will compel the international community to take concrete actions to improve North Korea’s human rights situation.
The ‘Conclusions and Recommendations’ (Section VII) of the report is an insightful and brave list of proposed action points. It is brave because many of the recommendations are in sharp contrast to the current policies toward the DPRK being pursued by the international community. They also contradict the thinking of the orthodox North Korean human rights lobby which has promoted sanctioning and isolation.
Among its recommendations, the COI report instead calls for ‘the promotion of incremental change through more people-to-people contacts’ in areas including ‘science, sports, good governance and economic development’ to ‘provide citizens of the DPRK with opportunities to exchange information and be exposed to experiences outside their home country’. In pursuit of that goal the report asks countries to remove obstacles such as visa bans and travel restrictions in all but exceptional cases. Further, it supports the provision of humanitarian assistance and criticises the withholding of humanitarian aid as a tool to impose economic or political pressure on the DPRK, while recognising the importance of strong monitoring systems. These latter aspects of the recommendations are explicitly direct and refreshingly welcome in a debate that has long searched for agreement about how to deal with North Korea.
A striking part of the recommendation section is its emphasis on the international community’s responsibility to resolve the North Korean human rights problem.
While assigning full culpability to the DPRK regime for the abuses and suffering of the North Korean population, it reminds the international community — in the rather forthright tone often associated with the chief author and former judge Michael Kirby — that ‘the international community must accept its responsibility to protect the people of the DPRK from crimes against humanity … in the light of the role played by [it] … (and by the great powers in particular) in the division of the Korean peninsula and because of the unresolved legacy of the Korean War’. That includes Australia.
Australia did once play an important role in efforts to resolve tension on the Korean peninsula. Australia encouraged people-to-people contact through the presence of a DPRK Embassy in Canberra, and the hosted an economics training programme for North Korean bureaucrats at The Australian National University’s Crawford School. Since the embassy closed and the training programme ended, the Australian government — whether led by Labor or the Liberals — has shown little enthusiasm for supporting the reopening of these channels.
Of course some of the report’s other, wholly justified, recommendations will make it difficult to get the North’s agreement to participate in such programmes. These include: a call for the DPRK leadership to account for their actions to the International Criminal Court; openness and political reform inside the country; targeted sanctions against those responsible for crimes against humanity; and China to reverse its policy of refusing to recognise North Korean refugees and repatriating them.
So implementing the recommendations of this report will not be easy. The first step will be to encourage the human rights community to recognise and support the philosophy of bringing about change inside the DPRK through engagement rather than isolation. Even this step is fraught with difficulties. Kirby’s frequent public comparisons of the DPRK with horrors committed by Nazi Germany in the Holocaust are deeply unhelpful. And Amnesty International, whose excellent work has long detailed the abuses inside North Korea, recently questioned the planned visit of Britain’s Globe Theatre to take a Shakespeare play to the DPRK — a visit which is all about promoting people-to-people contacts in the spirit of the COI report recommendations.
Still, the recommendations in the report provide a long-awaited opportunity to revisit the international community’s strategy toward North Korea. Any strategy should, of course, include directly addressing the DPRK government’s human rights abuses. But it should not preclude engagement and exchange in other areas. Kirby’s report provides the international community with a plan for promoting social and political change in North Korea. Let us hope that the spotlight provided by the UN and public outrage will finally lead to the international community accepting ‘its responsibility to protect the people of the DPRK’.
Emma Campbell is a Korea Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.
A version of this article will appear in the forthcoming April 2014 issue of the Asian Studies Association of Australia’s electronic newsletter Asian Currents.
I commend Dr Campbell’s commentary for drawing attention not only to the horrific state of affairs afflicting the populace of the DPRK, but also to the urgency of moving away from the traditional, and utterly ineffective, approach to North Korea, and initiating policies based on engagement.
Dr Campbell hints at the futility, recorded over the past six decades, of coercive, punitive and threatening isolation imposed on the DPRK by the United States and its allies, and shines a light on the possibility of likely change, promised by an alternative – incremental engagement with people-to-people contacts at the leading edge of efforts.
Sadly, as these measures are recommended by a UN-led inquiry, the prospect for their implementation must remain moot. Many equally worthy UN-sponsored reports have gathered dust unnoticed and unmourned in important chanceries around the world for decades. The UN’s inability to act as an autonomous and superordinate body distinct from P5, designated largely by the outcome of World War II in 1945, only allows it to function at the margins of dynamics shaped primarily by great-power (mainly the US) interests and actions. And the US has demonstrated little understanding of the folly of pushing the DPRK regime into a dark corner with frequent and regular displays of military muscularity to which Pyongyang has understandably responded defensively with even greater tenacity and pugnacity, and very likely will continue to do so in the future. The failure of the US-led alliance to rid Pyongyang of its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes is comprehensible to folks armed with the most basic intelligence, but not apparently to those who man the shining City on the Hill.
Tragically, the fact is that there is no meaningful “international community” other than in easy phrases used by bored bureaucrats and lazy media-personnel. States, usually representing the interests of the most powerful segments and coalitions of their elites, pursue what they consider their “national interest,” and survival being the most basic of these, there is no reason to believe the DPRK will change its ways simply because the US and its allies wish that it would.
The openly inconsistent application of stated principles in international affairs, especially where great-power (read mainly but not exclusively the US) interests are concerned, does not make things easier. Although successive regimes in Pyongyang have been responsible for inflicting a bestial environment on their wards, Moscow and Beijing have not flinched from their support for the Kims and their military acolytes. Sadly, in terms of pursuing universal values, Washington has not displayed any greater ethical distinction between “global” and “national” interests, often conflating the two. In such an order, North Korean horror stories can be written and spoken about, but cannot be done away with.
S. Mahmud Ali treats us to the leftist view of what’s wrong with N Korea and of course the US is to blame. The US does not control the UN or its security council. There have been no successive regimes in N Korea: the Kim family has been in power for over 60 years. South Korea had the sunshine policy for over 10 years where they tried to engage N Korea and gave it over 7 billion dollars and got nothing in return, and it did not free a single person from a N Korean gulag. Mr Ali please enlighten us as to what should the US do to get N Korea to give up its missiles and nuclear weapons and stop the extreme repression of over 90 per cent of its people.