Editor's
note: South Korea's state-run Yonhap news agency,
citing intelligence and diplomatic sources in
China, said North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's
armored train crossed the border on Tuesday and
was due to arrive in Shanghai on Wednesday. China
declined to confirm that the North Korean
strongman was in the country, but hinted that the
news reports may be true.
Though
it would be difficult to find anyone in the
United States who would praise North Korea for its
dismal human-rights record, this consensus by no means
extends to practical foreign policy.
In
other words, there is broad agreement on what is
wrong in North Korea, from the political labor
camps to the lack of basic freedoms of speech and
assembly, but little agreement on what to do about
it or who should be doing it.
At
the governmental level, policymakers are divided
on whether to link the human-rights issue to other
pressing concerns such as the nuclear crisis or
humanitarian aid. In Congress, an effort is under
way to build on existing legislation and embed the
human rights movement in a grand "regime change"
strategy targeting the world's remaining
dictatorships, but financial considerations and
traditional balance-of-power calculations may
derail this initiative.
In the world
of non-governmental organizations (NGOs),
an evangelical movement has clothed its
primary concern for religious freedom in the garb
of universal human rights and has gained
much political capital, thanks to vocal church
support and a faith-based climate of opinion.
But mainstream human-rights organizations - as well as
mainstream religious organizations such as the
National Council of Churches - remain wary of the
missionary zeal and hardline strategies of these
evangelicals.
Divergent strategic
approaches might suggest a diversity of policy
alternatives on the issue of North Korean human
rights, but the discussion taking place in the
United States is rather narrow. Indeed, one of the
grave defects of US policy on this issue, from the
governmental level to the NGO level, has been its
myopia.
Given the human-rights
record of the Bush administration and its
predilection for using the human-rights records of other
countries as a justification for regime change, it may
well be impossible for the United States to devise
a more nuanced and effective human-rights policy
toward North Korea. It should be possible,
however, to learn from both the strengths and
limitations of the approaches of other
international actors.
The question of
linkage The neo-conservatives shaping
US foreign policy do not trace their origins
simply to the "rise of the Vulcans" in the 1990s.
[1] Neo-conservative thought emerged in the 1970s as
a reaction to the drift in the Republican
Party toward detente with the Soviet Union
and rapprochement with communist China.
Several Democrats, chief among them Congressman Henry "Scoop"
Jackson from Washington state, criticized this
apparent reduction in vigilance toward the
"communist threat".
Jackson joined
forces with fellow Democrat Charles Vanik of Ohio
to sponsor a piece of legislation that linked
the granting of most-favored-nation status in trade
to the human-rights record of non-market countries,
especially the Soviet Union, most notably
regarding its policies restricting the emigration
of Soviet Jews.
This legislation,
the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the 1974 Trade
Reform Act, was the best known of
several neo-conservative efforts to undermine the
economic engagement and arms-control negotiations that
characterized US-Soviet detente. [2] Since the
legislation resulted in an immediate decline in
levels of emigration for Soviet Jews, it would
appear to have failed.
But its larger
goal was to slow the momentum of detente, and in
this realm it was successful. The
budding neo-conservative movement, relatively liberal
on domestic issues but hawkish on foreign
policy questions, quickly built upon the larger
victory of linkage. The Committee on the Present
Danger, revitalized in 1976, drove the stake through
the heart of detente by trumpeting the Soviet
threat and emphasizing the USSR.'s poor human-rights
record.
Between Scoop Jackson's proteges
(Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith) and
hawkish liberals on the Committee on the Present
Danger (Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Paul Wolfowitz), the
Cold War Democrats who morphed into
neo-conservatives played a key role in the
election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and, 20 years
later, the election of George W Bush.
The
deep suspicion that neo-conservatives have
traditionally harbored toward detente - or
"engagement" in today's lingo - explains much
about current US policy toward North Korea. The
mistrust of arms control treaties with the Soviet
Union in the 1970s finds its parallel in the
rejection of the 1994 Agreed Framework, which
froze North Korea's nuclear capabilities in
exchange for economic and political Incentives
that US hardliners were ultimately reluctant to
provide.
The belief that expanded
trade relations would strengthen the Soviet Union -
and the fear that such trade has empowered China
- translates today into a similar reluctance
to engage North Korea economically. And the use
of human rights as a wedge issue to undermine
detente is echoed these days in comparable attempts -
in the United States, Japan and South Korea - to
link engagement policies with human-rights
improvements.
Neo-conservatives, however,
are not the only force within the Bush
administration, and linkage is only one tradition
from which current policymakers draw inspiration.
Career diplomats in the State Department,
currently working hard to negotiate away North
Korea's nuclear program, are concerned that
ineffectual language on human rights might
jeopardize any potential agreement. "We have no
interest in weaponizing human rights," chief US
negotiator Christopher Hill remarked recently. [3]
Careful to find a compromise
between the pragmatic center and
neo-conservative hardliners, Hill has kept the human-rights issue
visible without explicitly linking human-rights violations
to the nuclear negotiations. He has argued,
simply, that North Korea won't be able to join the
international community without addressing these
violations.
The debate within the Bush
administration over linkage will likely heat up if
the nuclear negotiations gain any traction. Since
the six-party talks can founder over a wide range
of issues - the nature of the economic-security
trade-off, the issue of sequence, the matter of a
civilian nuclear program - those who are opposed
to any agreement with North Korea need not play
the human rights card so early in the game.
After all, it was comparatively late in
the detente era that Henry Jackson and the
emerging neo-conservative movement pushed for
linkage. If negotiators come close to signing a
substantive pact far meatier than the September 19
agreement on general principles, the calls for
linkage will likely grow louder.
It
is also not yet clear what role the special envoy
for human rights, Jay Lefkowitz, will play. In
early September, when he hinted that humanitarian
aid should be linked to human-rights considerations,
senior Bush administration figures quickly moved
to assure the media that US policy had not changed
and that such linkage would not be made. [4]
Lefkowitz's remarks were no
doubt influenced by a recent report on food and
human rights issued by the US Committee for Human
Rights in North Korea. Written by Stephan Haggard
and Marcus Noland, the report argues that "it
is misguided to separate the humanitarian and
human-rights discourses" and recommends that food aid be
linked to a larger project of political change
within North Korea. [5]
With North Korea
demanding a shift from multilateral food aid to
multilateral development assistance - and the
removal of the trump card of pure humanitarianism
- these calls for linkage will become more
politically palatable. Together with Vice
President Dick Cheney's office, Lefkowitz will
likely emerge as a key administration proponent of
linkage, but whether he champions this approach at
the six-party talks or pursues his work on a
parallel track remains to be seen.
Congressional strategies After
the 1994 Agreed Framework temporarily alleviated
the security crisis by freezing North Korea's
nuclear program, Congress failed to move on to the
other outstanding issues in US-North Korean
relations, namely advancing diplomatic and
economic ties. Instead of fulfilling the terms of
the Agreed Framework, legislators remained fixated
on the security question.
Opposition
to the 1994 agreement focused on the
continuing military threat posed by Pyongyang. Just
as opponents of detente with the Soviet
Union exaggerated the Soviet military threat in
the 1970s, critics of the Agreed Framework
attempted to show that the threat from North Korea had
not diminished after 1994. Their efforts produced
the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission on ballistic-missile
threats - which imagined a North Korean strike
against the territorial United States - and the
reports and hearings of the hardline North Korea
Advisory Group (NKAG). [6]
In 2000, those
previously opposed to the Bill Clinton administration
policy on North Korea, such as Donald Rumsfeld and
Richard Armitage, moved into the State Department
and the Pentagon. When the Bush administration
in effect abandoned the negotiating premises
of the Agreed Framework as well as the joint
US-North Korean statement of October 2000 - which
pledged to reduce mutual hostilities and take
further steps toward diplomatic normalization -
the Republican-controlled Congress dropped
its previous focus on security. Instead, it took
up the human-rights issue, first in the North Korea
Freedom Act and then by passing the North Korean
Human Rights Act in 2004.
Thus, after the
1994 pact, while the Clinton administration was
looking at non-security issues, Congress focused
on security, but after 2000, when security issues
became something of an embarrassment for the Bush
administration, Congress shifted to non-security
issues. [7] Legislators might have participated
meaningfully in the security debate after the 2002
crisis broke by signaling that funds would be
available for dismantling North Korea's nuclear
program and identifying energy alternatives for
the country, but Congress failed to act.
In 2005, new congressional legislation
placed regime change in North Korea in a much
larger context. The ADVANCE Democracy Act of 2005,
which has garnered the co-sponsorship of prominent
liberals (Barack Obama in the Senate, Patrick
Kennedy in the House), has an ambitious goal: to
bring down the world's remaining 45 or so
dictatorships by 2025. The bill specifies
non-violent means, namely the promotion of
democracy and human rights, to achieve regime
change. It echoes Bush's 2005 State of the Union
speech calling for the United States to "stand
with the allies of freedom to support democratic
movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the
ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world". [8]
Specifically, the bill elevates democracy
promotion throughout the chain of command in the
State Department. It would establish at the top a
new Office of Democratic Movements and
Transitions, require the State Department to issue
an annual democracy report and set up an advisory
board to evaluate all democracy-promotion
activities and spending. It proposes to turn US
embassies into "islands of freedom" and align US
diplomats with pro-democracy movements in
non-democratic countries.
It would even
link performance pay and promotions of foreign
service officers to their efforts in spreading
democracy. Initially funded at US$250 million for
two years, the act would direct resources to
pro-democracy movements worldwide. And it would
authorize the president to block financial flows
to states that resist democratization. [9]
This congressional effort to enshrine
regime change in the very mission of the State
Department - and replace the more conventional
goal of advancing US interests through
balance-of-power alliances - essentially makes
linkage into an official policy of the United
States. No longer will human rights simply be
linked to a trade treaty or an arms reduction
pact.
This legislation would condition US
relations across the spectrum of issues with every
single country in the world. In terms of North
Korea, the bill would make normalization of
relations and improved economic ties more
difficult if not impossible, and would give the
president power to further isolate Pyongyang
economically if it doesn't alter its internal
political structures. Engagement would be held
hostage to "democracy", a term subject to
considerable interpretation nowadays.
Although the ADVANCE Democracy Act is
likely to pass, Congress has not necessarily
subscribed to this broad interpretation,
particularly as it relates to North Korea. Even
some Republicans support the pragmatic
recommendation, first articulated in the Perry
Report in 1999, to deal with North Korea as it is,
not as one might like it to be. The Heritage
Foundation spoke for many Republicans and
traditional conservative organizations when it
supported democracy promotion but also,
pragmatically, cautioned lawmakers to take into
account "US vital interests" and not to constrain
the executive branch's capacity to shape foreign
policy. [10]
The NGO approach
Mainstream human-rights organizations have long
had difficulty deciding how to approach North
Korea. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch grew out of a tradition of promoting
solidarity between those in "free" countries and
those living under authoritarian rule. Without any
means of establishing connections with dissidents
or political prisoners within North Korea, both
organizations initially did not know how to fit
that troubled country into their established
framework of action.
Human Rights Watch
co-produced a report on North Korea in the 1980s
that, because of the difficulty of verifying the
information, did not quite live up to the group's
exacting standards. [11] Amnesty International has
been reluctant to publish reports without
verifiable information, though in the 1990s it
began to issue documents on public executions and
the treatment of North Korean refugees. [12]
It took a new organization, the US
Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, to
produce the first in-depth study. Authored by
David Hawk, a former head of Amnesty International
USA, The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's
Prison Camps drew on extensive interviews with
refugees and defectors to give details on the
size, conditions and purposes of the political
labor camp system. [13] With thousands of
defectors now living in South Korea, Hawk was able
to do the crosschecking and verification that had
previously been so difficult.
As such,
his report had more credibility than the 1988
Human Rights Watch report and goes a long way
toward separating truth from exaggeration in
the testimonies of defectors. The
report's recommendations are generally circumspect:
North Korea should abide by the recommendations made
by various UN human-rights bodies. In other words,
North Korea should be treated as a country like
all other countries and not an Illegitimate state
to be brought down. Although the US Committee for
Human Rights in North Korea has quite a few
hardliners on its board - such as Chuck Downs,
Nicholas Eberstadt and Carl Gershman - they share
power with moderates such as Morton Abramowitz and
Samantha Powers, and the committee is careful not
to engage in any political lobbying.
Because the committee
focused on non-partisan activities and since
mainstream human-rights organizations remained somewhat
cautious, the field was open for new and more
aggressive NGOs to tackle North Korean human-rights issues.
These new NGOs fall into two basic categories. The
first exemplified by the Defense Forum Foundation
stems from a Cold War hawkish tradition.
The Defense Forum Foundation worked to
bring the "regime change" perspective of North
Korean defectors such as Hwang Jeong Yop to
Capitol Hill. The second group, which includes
evangelical organizations such as the Christian
Coalition and the Salvation Army, raises the issue
of human rights at the grassroots level among US
churches.
The Cold War conservatives in
the first group have generally linked human rights
to questions of military security, while the
evangelicals have viewed human rights through the
prism of religious freedom. For both groups, the
issue of human rights serves as a lever to pry
open North Korea and precipitate the demise of the
state. But the hawkish NGOs fit regime change into
their larger agenda of keeping East Asia -
including China - firmly within their conception
of America's sphere of influence, while the
evangelical NGOs view the current North Korean
government as the chief obstacle to religious
proselytizing.
An uneasy collaboration
between these two forces produced the North Korea
Freedom Coalition, which rallied support for the
North Korean Human Rights Act. This tenuous
alliance also created momentum for the ADVANCE
Democracy Act, when Michael Horowitz of the
neo-conservative Hudson Institute joined forces
with the National Coalition for Religious Freedom
and Human Rights, a below-the-radar group of
evangelicals. [14] These forces are currently
building support for the Scoop Jackson National
Security and Freedom Act of 2005, which would set
limits on US trade with China if Beijing doesn't
change its policy of returning refugees to North
Korea.
This same coalition is cooperating
on a set of three conferences sponsored by Freedom
House and financed by the US government. At the
first gathering in Washington, DC, in July,
neo-conservatives and evangelicals dominated the
agenda, marginalizing mainstream human rights
groups. Key voices from the 1970s debates against
detente clearly articulated their regime change
perspective.
Former Soviet dissident and Israeli
cabinet minister Natan Sharansky echoed the
words of Cheney when he declared at the conference,
"You confront evil, you do not negotiate
with it." [15] Relatively moderate voices
at the conference, such as Republican Congressman Jim
Leach of Iowa, were in effect drowned out.
At the second conference in Seoul in December,
far-right South Korean organizations in
effect kept their mainstream counterparts in the
human-rights movement off the agenda. Christian
evangelism, meanwhile, has worked Its way into the
very warp and weave of the movement, as could be
seen both at the Seoul conference and in the
exhibits and presentations devoted to North Korean
human rights at Rock the Desert, a Christian music
festival held in August in Midland, Texas. [16]
Nuancing the issue of North Korean
human rights still further, a fourth category of
NGOs has emerged. Representatives of
humanitarian organizations, former government
officials critical of Bush administration policy
and assorted academics, while acknowledging the
extent of North Korea's human-rights abuses, have argued
for a rigorous delinking of the issue from the
current negotiations over the nuclear problem.
Such groups include Mercy Corps, Friends Committee
on National Legislation and the Alliance of
Scholars Concerned about Korea.
Policy
alternatives The policy debate in the
United States, and particularly in Washington, has
largely focused on whether to link human rights to
the current nuclear impasse - either in a genuine
effort to improve human rights in North Korea or
to force regime change - or to delink the two and
proceed with dispatch to settle the nuclear
question. The narrowness of this agenda is partly
a legacy of the 1970s, when a similar question
influenced the fate of US-Soviet detente. This
mindset stems in part from the demands of
policymaking in Washington, which boils down to
amendments to legislation and ways to affect the
appropriations process.
It also derives
from the hard-line NGO coalition of
neo-conservatives and evangelicals for whom the
strategy of linkage offers a perfect convergence
of interests.
The human rights debate
should not be reduced to this either-or approach
to linkage. Other approaches exist, though they
also carry with them potential pitfalls.
Expand the definition of human rights:
there are two human rights traditions enshrined in
international accords - the political and civil
definition and the economic and social definition.
The political and civil tradition emphasizes
individual rights and freedoms; the economic and
social tradition focuses on the welfare of groups
and the allocation of public goods. North Korea
has emphasized the latter definition when
articulating "our-style human rights". In addition
to criticizing the United States for its
international policies, North Korea has charged
the United States with failing to meet the
economic and social needs of its population.
According to an editorial from the Korean
Central News Agency In Pyongyang: "Now so many
people of the United States are jobless and
destitute and cannot enjoy medical care for lack
of money. According to recent data available, 38.2
million people are suffering from hunger." [17]
Implicit in this criticism is the argument that
North Korea, with free public health care, high
literacy levels and guaranteed jobs for all, does
better in these public realms than does the United
States.
North Korea might have been
able to tout its human rights record as
regards economic and social welfare in the 1960s. Today
it still does well compared with Haiti or Bangladesh,
but North Korea has never wanted to be compared to
poor countries. Compared with the West, or even to
its neighbor China, North Korea currently performs
poorly on all social and economic indicators.
Some humanitarian organizations argue
that providing food aid to North Korea is
more important human-rights work than campaigning for
greater political freedoms. They contend that in
cases in which massive starvation looms, the right
to food trumps other rights and that Western human
rights are a luxury that North Korea can ill
afford at this time. There is some merit to this
approach, particularly given that, unlike South
Africa under apartheid, there is no civic movement
within North Korea calling on the population to
endure economic hardship to obtain political
freedoms.
It would be a grave mistake
to link humanitarian aid to human rights
improvements - and thus risk exacerbating the suffering of
the very people that need the most help - but it
is also a mistake not to see how the two human
rights traditions go hand in hand. The United States,
in refusing to see poverty alleviation as a
human-rights issue, is making the same mistake that
North Korea does when it doesn't connect its
current food crisis to political and civil rights.
Whether Amartya Sen's overall argument
that famines don't occur in democracies is correct
or not, North Korea's food crisis would have been
less severe if the majority of the population had
been able to communicate its interests and
concerns in a more transparent manner, if there
had been greater freedom of movement and if a
legal framework had been in place for assessing
competing claims to scarce resources. [18]
The basket approach: when human rights finally
made it on to the inter-governmental agenda
in the detente era, negotiators at the Conference
on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE)
devised the "three-basket" approach for handling
security questions, economic and cultural
exchanges and the "human dimension". Progress
along one track was not dependent on progress
along any of the other two. In this way, human
rights could be part of the discussions but not
contingent on any other issue. Human rights was
thus bundled with, but not linked to, security and
economic cooperation.
At the time, US
hardliners dismissed this "bundling" approach as
ineffectual or, worse, as appeasement,
particularly in comparison with the linkage
efforts of neo-conservatives such as Scoop
Jackson. Today, US hardliners have a tendency to
conflate the two traditions and praise the very
Helsinki process that they and their predecessors
excoriated.
The bundled but delinked
approach seems well suited to the North Korean
situation. European countries essentially handled
their North Korea policy in this fashion in the
1990s, establishing diplomatic relations with
Pyongyang and pursuing various forms of economic
and cultural cooperation, thereby positioning
themselves to initiate a dialogue on human rights.
This approach initially held promise, as Pyongyang
agreed to discuss human rights, even individual
cases, with European representatives.
However, when the European Union
initiated a UN Human Rights Commission resolution in
2003 censuring North Korea for such human rights
abuses as torture and public executions, North
Korea called off its human-rights dialogue with Europe.
Precisely because the human rights discussion was
delinked - not connected to any incentives such as
economic investment or discussions that might lead
to such incentives - North Korea could break off
dialogue without fear of losing anything.
Another drawback to the basket approach is
that North Korea is well aware of events in the
1970s. New civil society groups in the Soviet bloc
- Moscow Trust Group, Charter 77, KOR - demanded
that their governments be held accountable to the
official language on human rights adopted in the
final statement of the Helsinki Accords. Activists
used this language as a kind of crowbar to widen
public space in countries without free media or
the freedom for groups to assemble.
This
opening came as a result of perception rather than
policy, since the Helsinki Accords did not
establish any new human rights law but merely
required signatories to abide by the UN Charter
and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So
Pyongyang may well be reluctant to sign anything
regarding human rights, even if the document
doesn't entail additional obligations, simply
because it wants to avoid a repeat of what
happened in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s.
Quiet diplomacy: several governments
have worked hard to provide North Korean
government officials with training on human-rights issues.
This work is done very quietly with no public
fanfare. In Asia generally, the group HuRights
Osaka has created opportunities for government
officials from Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar (though
not yet North Korea, at least publicly) to meet
and discuss human rights issues in a
non-threatening environment. By encouraging a
change in attitudes and policies over the long
term, this low-key work offers a complementary
alternative to the "name and shame" activities of
mainstream human rights organizations and many
governments.
The advocates of quiet
diplomacy hope that as new technocrats take over
from traditional revolutionary leaders, those who
have had a chance to mingle with their
internationally minded counterparts from other
countries will adopt reform programs to bring the
human rights records of their nations more in line
with international standards.
Quiet
diplomacy can only succeed, however, away from the
media spotlight. Once contacts within a closed
system are exposed as reformers, they risk
isolation, loss of influence or worse. Viewed as
interference, quiet diplomacy collapses. But as
long as the media doesn't cover such initiatives,
hardliners can argue that quiet diplomacy either
doesn't exist or is ineffectual and that only
tactics of escalating pressure are viable.
Paradoxically, the most effective on-the-ground
engagement cannot be used to bolster arguments for
on-the-ground engagement more generally.
Economic engagement: central to the
gradualist approach to Korean reunification is the
notion that economic engagement would encourage
political and social change within North Korea.
According to this reasoning, which derives in part
from the Chinese experience after the country's
1979 reforms, economic engagement would strengthen
reformers within the North Korean government,
empower a budding array of entrepreneurs, produce
a new middle class and eventually stimulate some
form of civil society that would demand greater
representation.
Even the North Korean
military would buy into the reform process by
setting up its own companies, and interaction with
international financial institutions would force
transparency upon North Korean financial (and
political) institutions. Indeed, recent engagement
has thus far produced modest Chinese-like reforms
in North Korea culminating in the country's 2002
economic reforms.
However, there are
several challenges to this approach. China was
able to take several decades to experiment with
its economic reforms, and it did so largely
outside the neo-liberal demands of international
institutions such as the World Trade Organization.
China was also starting from an economic position
considerably less constrained than North Korea's
with its malnourished population.
Moreover, the Chinese market
offered foreign investors the enticement of over 1
billion potential consumers (compared with North Korea
's mere 23 million). And China's economic engagement
took place during the Cold War, when the United
States subordinated human rights in China to the
larger goal of balancing the power of the Soviet
Union. In addition to the drawbacks of its small
and weakened population, North Korea doesn't have
the time, the space independent of neo-liberal
international institutions, or the maneuvering
room accorded by the realpolitik considerations of
geopolitics that China enjoyed.
Moreover, North
Korea has cast a suspicious eye on reform-oriented
outsiders for bearing the "poisoned
carrot"of economic incentives. Members of
the North Korean elite are not interested in presiding
over Soviet-style economic reforms that erode
their political legitimacy and lead to governmental
collapse. How can Korean power brokers
distinguish between market reforms that preserve
political leadership, as in China, from those
that undermine that leadership, as in the Soviet
Union? And would the economic reforms promoted
by outsiders, when finally realized, unleash
not economic prosperity but the kind of "shock
therapy" that destabilized governments
throughout the former Soviet bloc?
Conclusion: What works? The
perils of linkage include disrupting current
negotiations over the nuclear issue and
threatening the overall engagement strategy - much
as linkage unraveled US-Soviet detente in the
1970s. The focus on whether to link or not to link
has also obscured other approaches to human rights
questions connected to North Korea, though these
blueprints are not without their own drawbacks.
North Korea might view the basket approach
as a soft regime change strategy; quiet diplomatic
efforts require patience and a long-term
perspective, and the lack of media attention does
little to advertise the benefits of this plan; the
expanded definition of human rights doesn't paint
North Korea in any better colors and neglects the
political and civil dimension of the current
economic crisis; and economic engagement carries
with it the whiff of a "poisoned carrot" and the
probability of political crackdowns a la Singapore
or China, as the North Korean leadership attempts
to restrict reform from expanding beyond the
economic sector.
Despite (or
perhaps because of) the above defects, these
policy alternatives suggest that a heterogeneous
approach stands the greatest chance of success - if
success is measured by a general improvement in
the economic well-being of the population and
a reduction in the most egregious human-rights
violations such as summary executions and
political labor camps. South Korea, Japan, Europe
and the United States are always going to view
North Korea differently, given their distinctive
ethnic and geopolitical lenses of interpretation.
It might be appropriate, therefore, that
these varied actors take on separate roles: Europe
pursuing quiet diplomacy, South Korea engaging the
North economically, humanitarian NGOs focusing on
food as a human right, and the US government along
with mainstream human rights NGOs undertaking
"name and shame" activities.
There are,
however, two drawbacks to this approach of
functional diversity. "Name and shame" activities
are a vital component of human rights work,
whether applied to North Korea's labor camps or US
detention facilities in Iraq and Cuba. But "name
and shame" activities, if promoted by a powerful
actor such as the US government, can overwhelm all
the other strategies, making South Korea's
engagement policy, for instance, weaker
internationally and more scorned domestically.
It is important, therefore, to strive for
some measure of balance among the different
strategies. It is also important to acknowledge
that different actors within countries pursue a
variety of strategies. In the United States, the
State Department has shown some support for the
"bundling" approach, while several US NGOs are
engaged In quiet diplomacy - even as key figures
in the Bush administration have concentrated on
shaming Pyongyang.
The second drawback
is perhaps more fundamental. Not all
organizations working on human rights in North Korea share
the same goals. During the era of the
Helsinki Accords, even the most vocal human-rights
organizations in the Soviet bloc didn't call for
the collapse of their governments. Efforts were
directed toward improving human rights within the
current systems.
Today, however, several
of the more vocal human rights organizations -
both neo-conservative and evangelical - have the
maximalist agenda of erasing North Korea from the
map. In the 1970s, neo-conservatives devised
linkage to undercut detente; today, the linkage
problem relates not simply to the viability of
engagement but to the very survival of the North
Korean state.
To the extent
that human-rights activities are linked to
government collapse, they risk creating greater human-rights
problems than they purport to solve. While these
potential problems - including economic crisis,
refugee outflow, violent factional disputes, loose
nukes and even war - are of obvious concern to the
international community, they pose the greatest
threat to Koreans themselves. South Korea already
faces challenges assimilating several thousands
North Korean defectors: tens of thousands would
overwhelm the system.
The great disparity
between the two economies - much larger than that
between East and West Germany in 1989 - suggests
that sudden economic integration would send South
Korea into a prolonged crisis. Even collapse
without integration would jeopardize the South's
economic standing (not to mention the impact on
northeast China, home to thousands of ethnic
Koreans). It is no surprise, then, that except for
a fringe element, Korean politicians and social
movements seek to avoid regime collapse In the
North.
If the scenario of functional
diversity is to succeed, it must be clearly
distinguished from state-elimination agendas.
Governments and organizations should commit to an
improvement of the political and economic welfare
of North Koreans within their existing system,
however modified that system might become. Human
rights should be viewed as part of the engagement
strategy, not contrary to it. Moreover, this
engagement approach, which has largely been
restricted to North-South relations, must be
embedded in a much larger process of integration.
The first step in a diversified game plan
involves the Northeast Asian community. China has
proposed institutionalizing the six-party talks,
which would give the region its first multilateral
security forum. A chief virtue of
institutionalizing the six-party talks is that
North Korea would become a working member of the
East Asian community. Ideally, these regional
discussions would expand beyond the nuclear issue
to include economic cooperation and the human
dimension.
To be effective, such
an approach should adopt an expanded definition
of human rights, should avoid any direct
references to the civil society experiences of the
Helsinki Accords, and should borrow from the experience
of quiet diplomacy in offering North
Korean government officials access to the same kind
of technical assistance in the human-rights realm
that they've been given in the economic and legal
sector.
Moreover, at least at first,
China can play a key role in articulating a human-rights
formula that can elicit North Korean cooperation,
perhaps under the general rubric of "human
security" and in the context of a working group
established within the six-party talks. Such a
"human security" framework might emphasize social
and economic rights and only gradually address
political and civil questions. Improving human
rights in North Korea to China's level, while not
ideal, is at least a pragmatic goal, and North
Korea is certainly more likely on this issue to
listen to the experiences of Chinese leaders than
to the advice of American or Japanese officials.
But regional integration is only the first
step in harmonizing North Korea's human rights
policies with global norms. To meet international
standards, North Korea must be ushered further
into the international community. Such integration
is the most effective path through which economic,
political and social benefits can flow to North
Korea. By the same token, for a coercive policy to
work with North Korea - from mild censure to more
extreme cancellation of programs - the country
must have a greater stake in the worldwide family
of nations.
Pyongyang must perceive that
it has something to lose if it doesn't conform to
global expectations, and North Korea must be
sufficiently in the public eye that its reputation
becomes a factor in its calculations.
Both
"name and shame" activists and engagement
advocates should keep this integration framework
in mind when pursuing their very different, but at
times complementary, agendas. But they should
avoid viewing themselves in simply a good cop, bad
cop, carrot or stick, role. North Korea must be
seen as a subject and not just an object.
Ultimately North Korea itself, either the
leadership or the citizenry but ideally both, must
decide how to create a system of rules that
protects human rights.
Outside
actors should think in terms of providing the tools
with which North Koreans can erect a human-rights
infrastructure themselves rather than simply
pursuing a "carrot and stick" approach that pushes
North Korea like an unthinking mule toward a
destination that only a supposedly wiser rider can
see.
Notes [1] James
Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Viking,
2004). [2] Jackson worked
particularly hard to undercut the SALT (Strategic
Arms Limitation Talks) process. See Seymour Hersh,
The Price of Power
(New York: Summit, 1983), pp 547-8, 558-9.
[3] "Special Press Briefing by Assistant Secretary
of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
Christopher R Hill on Upcoming Resumption of
the Six-Party Talks", Office of the Spokesman,
US Department of State, September 9, 2005. [4] "Rice
Denies Using Food Aid as Diplomatic Tool",
Japan Today, September 10, 2005. [5]
Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, Hunger and
Human Rights: The Politics of Famine
(Washington:
US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea,
September 2005). [6] The North Korea Advisory
Group (NKAG) included Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) and
Christopher Cox (R-CA). NKAG's final 1999 report
can be found here. [7]
See Karin Lee and Adam Miles,
"North Korea on Capitol Hill", Asian
Perspective, vol 28, no 4, 2004. [8]
"President Sworn in to Second Term", Office of the
Press Secretary, January 20, 2005. [9] For more
details, see John Feffer, "All Democracy, All the
Time", Salon, March 15, 2005. [10] Ariel
Cohen and Helle Dale, "The ADVANCE Democracy Act:
A Dose of Realism Needed", Executive Memorandum
968, April 8, 2005. [11] Confidential interviews
with those involved in the report: "Human
Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea (North Korea)", Minnesota Lawyers
International Human Rights Committee and Human
Rights Watch/Asia, December 1988. [12] See
reports from Amnesty International and more recent
reports from Human Rights Watch. [13] David
Hawk, The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's
Prison Camps
(Washington: US Committee for Human
Rights in North Korea, 2003). [14] Michael Horowitz,
"How to Win Friends and Influence Culture",
Christianity Today, September 2005.
[15] Gordon Cucullu, "Sharansky Takes on North Korea",
North Korea Freedom Coalition website, July
5, 2005. [16] David Kirkpatrick, "Christian Groups
Press Bush About North Korea", New York
Times, August 9, 2005. [17] "US, Principal
Violator of Human Rights", Korean Central News
Agency, December 9, 2005. [18]
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom
(New York: Anchor, 2000).
John Feffer is the
author of North Korea, South Korea: US Policy
at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories, 2003) and
the editor of the forthcoming The Future of
US-Korean Relations (Routledge, 2006). He is a
former Pantech Fellow In Korean Studies at
Stanford University.
