SPEAKING
FREELY North Korea's crimes go
unpunished By Robert Park
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
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contributing.
On April 23 in
commemoration of Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Days
of Remembrance, President Barack Obama announced
the creation of a US Atrocities Prevention Board
at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC,
ostensibly intended to assist the government in
preventing and responding to genocide and mass
atrocities.
PSD-10, the 2011 Presidential
Study Directive on Mass Atrocities, which resulted
in the creation of this board, states, "Preventing
mass atrocities and genocide is a core national
security interest and a
core moral responsibility of the United States."
In North Korea, mass atrocities tantamount
to genocide and crimes against humanity are taking
place, and scholarship documenting the DPRK's
unrestrained inhumanity continues to mount.
This year, an account written by
journalist Blaine Harden about one of my personal
heroes, Shin Dong-hyuk, the only known escapee
from a lifetime imprisonment North Korean
concentration camp, generated a resurgence of
interest.
In April, the US-based Committee
for Human Rights in North Korea released an
updated version of their 2003 report, "The Hidden
Gulag", once again with clear satellite images of
the camps.
And last month, South Korea's
National Human Rights Commission (NHRCK), a
non-partisan agency created by Seoul under the Kim
Dae-jung administration to safeguard human-rights
in the South, published a report with further
evidence of crimes against humanity collected from
interviews with many North Korean refugees who
have defected recently.
Reports indicate
government-enforced mass starvation, child
slavery, brutal torture and rape, arbitrary
executions and killings, forced abortions and
infanticide continue to take place unabated within
North Korea's prison camps. Hundreds of thousands
of innocents, one-third of whom are children,
remain enslaved under these hellish conditions
having committed no crime.
But very
disturbingly, none of the information is
particularly shocking to those who have followed
defector testimonies and read the various reports
detailing North Korean atrocities published over
the last decade. What ought to compel nations and
governments to invoke our "Responsibility to
Protect" has become the status quo in North Korea.
Phraseology and semantics, when referring
to North Korea's "human-rights situation", are
literally a matter of life and death. What is
occurring there are crimes against humanity as
defined by the Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court and genocide as interpreted by the
UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide, nothing less.
The
most plausible estimates are that from a
population of 22-24 million, between 2 million and
3.5 million people died from starvation or
hunger-related illnesses from 1994-1998, in spite
of one of the largest international aid efforts in
modern history. At the height of the famine, as
billions in food donations were pouring in from
the outside world, the regime systematically
diverted food aid to the military and party elite
and suspended commercial food imports, using the
money saved on massive military purchases and on
various non-essentials such as building an US$809
million mausoleum for Kim Il-sung.
Overwhelming evidence exposes this famine
as genocide on the same level of destruction as
Cambodia's Killing Fields and the 1994 Rwandan
genocide; of Holodomor dimensions and proportions;
instigated, nurtured and maintained by the DPRK
establishment to meet concrete political
objectives (One must always remember North Korea
has systematically starved masses in the prison
camps since its inception in 1945). Fifteen years
later, a devastating manmade famine rages on that
cannot be stopped, save by the intervention of the
international community.
With the possible
exception of apartheid, the DPRK is committing
every act defined as a crime against humanity by
the Rome Statute in a systematic manner and
utilizing every method of extermination determined
to be genocidal by the UN Genocide Convention in
its prison camps. In 2011, Amnesty International
released a report and satellite images indicating
that the camps have grown dramatically in size and
scope over the last 10 years.
Reports of
chemical and biological weapon experimentation and
the use of gas chambers in certain camps began
surfacing in the 1990s through the testimonies of
former prisoners and a former camp guard but first
found an international audience via the 2004 BBC
documentary, "Access to Evil". These reports have
never been discredited but in fact continue to
gain credence through corroborating accounts and
testimonies from North Korean refugees.
In
addition, North Korea is actively targeting for
destruction every group protected by the Genocide
Convention through its decades-long policy of
killing the half-Chinese babies of North Korean
women forcibly repatriated by China (constituting
genocide on national, ethnical, and/or racial
grounds) and via its systematic annihilation of
its indigenous religious population and their
families (genocide on religious grounds).
How to end this genocide should not be a
mystery to anyone. The solution lies within the
dictates of the UN Genocide Convention and the
Responsibility to Protect principle, where we
pledged to intervene first by "appropriate
diplomatic, humanitarian, and other peaceful
means" and then by force, if necessary, when any
given state fails to protect its populations from
genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and/or
crimes against humanity.
The tragic
reality is that no US administration has attempted
to intervene even diplomatically in behalf of the
masses of North Korean innocents in the prison
camps subject to extermination, and the literally
millions who will never be beneficiaries of food
aid no matter how much may be delivered.
Confronting the regime about mass atrocities has
always been sidelined due in large part to North
Korea's nuclear and WMD arsenal, but with no
success in improving global security; on the
contrary, the world is only in a more dangerous
and precarious moment than ever before in
reference to its relation to North Korea.
There are those who argue that World War
II was God's just punishment on the community of
nations for not intervening or taking decisive
action in behalf of the Jews. Correspondingly, the
reality today is that the only chance we have to
avert a second Korean War is to act urgently and
decisively for the sake of countless innocent
North Korean victims.
Invoking our
"Responsibility to Protect" and beginning a
diplomatic, humanitarian and peaceful intervention
through bringing North Korea's genocide before the
UN Security Council and increasing monetary
support to the DPRK's victims, the North Korean
refugees (whom studies indicate regularly and
effectively send via underground channels
remittances to family and friends who remain in
the North), can help save millions of North Korean
lives and facilitate the end of the regime.
Robert Park is a missionary,
human-rights activist and founding member of the
nonpartisan Worldwide Coalition to Stop Genocide
in North Korea.
Speaking Freely is
an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
not necessarily meet the same editorial standards
of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
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