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PYONGYANG
WATCH
Whose
suffering matters most?
By Aidan
Foster-Carter
"Selective indignation". I don't
know who coined the phrase, but it's a fine and useful
one. Unlike much that rolls off the tongue, it has
something to say, and it makes us think. In essence, it
asks: Is what we are mad at what we ought to be mad at?
Are we overlooking anything? How should we prioritize?
None of this is easy. In a world of suffering,
threats, and all manner of evil, just to work out what
is going on is tough enough. Information age? Sure - but
we're overloaded. Amid media sensationalism, and with
spin-meisters busy weaving their black arts, what can we
believe? Whom can you trust?
Another problem is
that figuring out the facts entails evaluation, at every
turn. To think through what's happening, and then what
matters, and then what to care about most - whether
morally or in terms of ranking threats, which may not be
the same - is not only highly complex, but intrinsically
value-laden.
Enough abstraction: some examples.
As I write from the United Kingdom, a quarter of my
country's army is heading for the Persian Gulf. Sure,
Saddam Hussein is a monster: Iraq and all of us would be
better off rid of him. But is he our No 1 threat? Not
while al-Qaeda has cells in my town, and maybe yours
too. Is Iraq the world's most evil regime? Not while Kim
Jong-il still rules. (Which doesn't mean I back an
attack there either, need I add. One Korean War was
already one too many. We should and can find a better
way.) If there is war with Iraq, will the world be safer
or more stable afterward? Why Iraq, why now, why this
way? George W Bush's selective indignation, I fear, is
twisting the United States' priorities and leading us
all into great peril. Hope I'm wrong.
But that
wasn't what I meant to write about. (It's just kind of
hard to ignore.) Let's head east to Japan, which for
months has been transfixed by a tale of kidnaps. Last
September Kim Jong-il sensationally admitted that North
Korea had indeed, as had long been rumored, abducted
several Japanese to train its own spies. He owned up to
13 abductees, of whom eight were dead - accidentally, of
course. That evasion wiped out any brownie points his
confession might have gained. Instead, anger has mounted
as the five survivors came home: temporarily at first,
then they decided to stay, with Tokyo demanding that
North Korea let their kids join them. The 13 may not be
all: dozens more suspected kidnaps are being probed.
An unholy mess, a row, a gripping soap opera -
and selective indignation. At the risk of unpopularity,
one has to ask: Just how big a deal is all this really,
or should it be? Of course, outrage and tragedy are both
involved. But in a wicked world, on a scale of 1 to 10,
where does this rank, compared with others?
Two
others in particular: one past, one present. Seen from
Korea, North or South, Japanese hysteria for a handful
of victims is in sharp contrast to Tokyo's refusal, even
now, to admit fully or compensate for what Japan did to
millions of Koreans: brutal occupation, forced labor,
torture, murder, sex slavery. Some new school textbooks
even try to deny all this. And Japan's prime minister
visits the Yasukuni Shrine, which memorializes Class A
warm criminals. Honestly, are the Japanese seeing
straight or not?
Selective indignation goes
further. Not only do a few Japanese count for more than
millions of Koreans - but some Japanese are more equal
than others. The unlucky 13 abductees, or others yet
unconfirmed, are not Pyongyang's only or first Japanese
victims. Spare a thought, as few of their compatriots
do, for the thousands of Japanese women who, 40 years
ago, dutifully accompanied their Korean husbands to go
and help build Kim Il-sung's new socialist paradise.
Almost 100,000 took that short but fateful journey into
the unknown, including at least 1,800 Japanese wives
(some estimates run much higher).
Paradise? Make
that paranoid. Even the Korean returnees from Japan were
suspect from the start. (For one such grim tale, which
ended in the gulag, read Kang Chol-hwan's book
Aquariums of Pyongyang.) Holiday visits? You must
be kidding. For decades, no Japanese were allowed home -
and Tokyo made no fuss whatever. Sexism and racism
combined here. Officially, these wives were now citizens
of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea - and
Japanese who wed Koreans were beyond the pale. When in
the late 1990s a trusted handful were briefly let out,
duly thanking Kim Jong-il, some found that their own
families refused to meet them.
Like Kim's other
victims, some have begun leaving without his permission.
Those fleeing North Korea for China include a few of
these Japanese women, now elderly. To be fair, Tokyo is
more sensitive to their plight these days: since 1996 a
few such escapees have quietly been helped to come back
to Japan.
But now the glare of publicity is
about to shine. Japanese media are reporting on an
unnamed woman of 64, who went to North Korea in 1959. In
1969 her husband was taken away, never to be seen again,
and she was sent to a bleak mountain village. In 2002
she fled to China, but was caught by "brokers" who
demanded a huge ransom from Tokyo. Last week Chinese
police detained the gangsters and their victim. After
delicate diplomacy, in due course she is expected to
come home and tell her sorry tale.
With
indignation already aroused over the abductions, this
time Japanese opinion may finally be ready to embrace
her and her kind. But as the media gear up for what
could be a bigger and even sadder saga than the kidnap
cases, let indignation no longer be selective. We should
all shed a tear and be angry for all of Kim Jong-il's
victims: Japanese and Korean, dead or alive. But what to
do? That's the hard part.
(©2003 Asia Times
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