Pyongyang shoots itself in the
foot By Sung-Yoon Lee
For decades, the Korean Central News
Agency (KCNA), North Korea's official state news
and propaganda agency, has delighted its foreign
readership with a virtually unparalleled supply of
comic tales, outrageous lies and self-parodied
propaganda.
Its latest reports on April 2
include such inspired headlines as "A poster for
the 10th Kimilsungia [an orchid named after the
late North Korean leader] Festival to be held on
the occasion of the Day of the Sun [Kim Il-sung's
birthday, April 15]" and "Flower-goldfish shops in
Pyongyang are crowded with people".
Yet,
among the mishmash of the news of the day, one
report inadvertently rang with uncommon common
sense, not to mention striking validity. KCNA
carried an editorial from Rodong Shinmun,
the official mouthpiece
of the North Korean Communist Party, titled "Japan
Urged to Settle Its Crime-Woven Past".
The
gist of the editorial is less than apparent in the
abbreviated English version; in the original
Korean version, more appropriately titled "Crimes
against humanity of the past can never be allowed
to remain buried", it is hard to miss. The main
criticism of the editorial is directed at Japan's
crackdown in recent years on the General
Association of Korean Residents in Japan,
otherwise known as Chongryon, whose officials have
long been suspected of involvement in and abetting
illicit transfer of funds to North Korea,
espionage and smuggling of missile parts and
illicit drugs.
To buttress his point, the
editorial writer invokes Japan's many egregious
offenses against Koreans during the colonial era,
especially during the war years between 1938 and
1945, including "imposed conscription, compulsory
labor and sexual slavery", which the writer calls
"unpardonable and most hideous abductions".
A staple of the KCNA diet, such oft-stated
claims are indeed valid historical grievances that
North Korea and Japan will have to resolve if the
two are ever to normalize diplomatic relations.
But the rare moment of unwitting cogency comes
with chilling clarity in the very next sentence:
"Any violator of international law is liable to
punishment under this law without exception. No
statute of limitations is applicable to the crimes
against humanity [sic]."
When it comes to
"crimes against humanity", which Article 7 of the
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court
defines as "widespread or systemic attack directed
against any civilian population, with knowledge of
attack", there is simply no better candidate for
prosecution than the Kim Jong-il regime.
Among the 10 specific systemic crimes
against civilians defined in Article 7 as crimes
against humanity - murder, extermination,
enslavement, deportation or forcible transfer of
population, imprisonment or other severe
deprivation of physical liberty, torture, sexual
slavery, persecution against any identifiable
group, enforced disappearance of person, and the
crime of apartheid - the Kim Jong-il regime
faithfully fulfills all but the last.
Amid
such a stellar record, the last underachievement
is of course a function of North Korean ethnic
homogeneity rather than lack of effort on the part
of the regime. Indeed, no statute of limitation
should be applied to the perpetrators of such
systemic, willful, sustained, egregious crimes. To
do so for the sake of political expediency or
rhetorical "peace and reconciliation" would be to
imply, to present and future generations, that
Koreans are beneath the law and the standards of
the civilized world.
The editorial above
lists, among Japan's offenses committed against
Koreans during the colonial era, "Japanese
imperialists' plunder of human and material
resources" and "effort to obliterate Korean
identity". Yet, the Japanese imperialists never
did starve to death one-tenth of the Korean
population or engender a generation of physically
stunted Koreans.
Nor did they operate
massive gulags or implement a totalitarian system
so rigid as to annihilate the most basic of human
freedoms, such as the freedom of expression,
conscience, press, movement, assembly, habitation,
profession and religion.
In fact, on
account of the deprivation of all these basic
freedoms, life in colonial Korea was far freer
than that in North Korea under the Kim Il-sung -
Kim Jong-il continuum throughout the sweep of the
North's political existence since 1948.
As
repressive and humiliating as Japanese colonial
rule was for Koreans, when measured against the
indices of "widespread and systemic crimes against
civilians", the North Korean regime comes through
on top unsurpassed in its criminal feats - in
degree, kind and duration.
The latest
North Korean salvo at Japan comes on the heels of
a bluster barrage over the course of the past
week, from expelling 11 of 13 South Korean
officials from the Kaesong Industrial Complex,
firing missiles into the West Sea, calling out
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak by name, and
threatening South Korea with preemptive nuclear
attack: "Everything will be in ashes, not just a
sea of fire, once our advanced pre-emptive strike
begins."
Such fits fall in line with North
Korea's pattern of taming new South Korean
administrations, for example, instigating a naval
skirmish in the West Sea in June 1999 soon after
president Kim Dae-jung took office and blessing
president Roh Moo-hyun's inauguration with a
multiple short-range missile salute in early 2003,
on February 24 and March 20.
The response
of the Lee Myung-bak administration to North
Korea's tantrums thus far has been appropriate - a
resolute mix of stoicism and principled apathy.
The real challenge may come when Lee's ratings
drop after a sustained period of tension or an act
of military provocation by the North, and critics
continue to carp at the Lee administration for the
instability or impasse in the nuclear
negotiations.
But the far greater
challenge will come when the North Korean regime
falls and unleashes a wave of humanitarian
challenges that the South Korean government will
have to meet in real time. North Korea may yet
survive the latest famine-in-the-making, even as
widespread food shortages have severely curtailed
rations in the capital city Pyongyang.
But
the North Korean economy is an inherently unstable
one, perpetually dependent on foreign aid and
unable to allocate resources to meet basic
consumption, as startlingly low as North Korea's
consumption level has been even for a
Marxist-Leninist economy.
Should the
regime collapse, providing North Korean refugees
with basic necessities like food, water, medicine
and shelter will be just one part of a large-scale
crisis management project. The reconstruction of
North Korea will be a monumental undertaking that
will require the concerted effort of the
international community.
Yet, short-term
human needs in the wake of regime collapse will be
met, and order eventually will be restored, as has
been the history of such crisis management efforts
in modern times. Rather, the historic moment of
truth, the defining moment in pan-Korean policy,
will come when the Korean people are faced with
the task of resolving once and for all - for the
sake of the rule of law, moral values,
psychological closure and posterity - the
multifarious crimes against humanity committed by
the Kim Jong-il regime.
The KCNA report of
April 2 may one day prove to be an unintended
portent of the "vicissitudes of political fortune"
- along the lines of Edward Gibbon [1] - to befall
the very regime that the propaganda agency serves:
vicissitudes that "spares neither man nor the
proudest of his works, which buries empires and
cities in a common grave". And woe betide any
South Korean government unprepared for that grave
task, a burial bound neither by political
exhumation nor any man-made statute of
limitations.
Note 1. Edward
Gibbon (April 27, 1737 to January 16, 1794) was an
English historian and member of parliament. His
most important work was The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Dr Sung-Yoon Lee is
adjunct assistant professor of international
politics at The Fletcher School, Tufts University,
and associate in research at the Korea Institute,
Harvard University.
(Published with
permission of The Korean American
Press.)
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