Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH Human rights: The sound of silence


	April 12, 2002	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
Human rights: The sound of silence
By Aidan Foster-Carter

Human rights in North Korea: now there's an oxymoron. There are none, by definition. Precious few, at any rate. This is the last Stalinist state left - and surely we know what those are like by now, a priori.

True - but not good enough. On principle, and especially with states that lie through their teeth and deny everything, we really do need evidence: names, dates, places. For North Korea, given its pervasive wall of silence, such chapter and verse was for many years all but impossible to get. South Korea happily dished the dirt, but in the bad old dictatorship days this was hardly a neutral source. Propaganda ruled.

Actually Seoul often came off worse in the propaganda wars, which was unfair. The difference between totalitarians and authoritarians is that the latter find it hard to keep their crimes a secret. For South Korea during the military regime era (1961-87), Amnesty International (AI) had little difficulty finding out the nitty gritty: who was in jail, where, how long; who was being tortured, where, how long; who ended up dead. Naming and shaming is easier when you at least have this to go on. By contrast, the North was an almost total blank.

One of the first to fill it was a Venezuelan communist poet, Ali Lameda. In 1967, working in Pyongyang as a translator of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (DPRK) ineffable propaganda - which even then, in Jon Halliday's splendid phrase, filled wastebins from Tegucigalpa to Tehran - he was unwise enough to tell his hosts that they ought to modify it for foreign consumption. For this "lese majeste" he was charged with spying and spent six years in solitary confinement. An older French colleague, a Spanish Civil War veteran, was jailed too - and died in Kim Il-sung's gulag. Lameda was released on the intercession of Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu - who thus did at least one good deed in his life - and later wrote a memoir, which AI published in 1979.

In the 1980s, two US monitors - Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee and Asia Watch - determined to tackle the hermit Kimdom full-on. In 1988 they published Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a 300-page book that set a benchmark for all subsequent work. Soberly presented and carefully researched - including tapping Koreans in Japan with relatives in North Korea, a valuable source previously overlooked - they provided a mine of information that still stands up.

Besides obvious topics - freedom of speech, religion, jail, torture, etc - this gave one of the first accounts of the regime's class system. Three main classes - loyal, wavering, hostile - subdivided into no fewer than 51 categories, predetermine all aspects of life in North Korea: residence, job, education, the lot. Besides individual rights, the social services that a communist regime would rather stress - social security, work, food, clothing, housing, health, education etc - were examined too, and found wanting or highly unequal.

Since then both the volume and quality of information have grown, partly due to an increasing if still tiny flow of defectors. Amnesty has published ever more detailed reports, including on specific issues such as North Korean lumber camps in Siberia - still in practice beyond the reach of Russian law. As a tart Moscow News headline put it, serfdom is alive and well. Amnesty has even visited North Korea, if to little effect.

Since 1996 the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), South Korea's official research body on the North, has published an annual white paper on human rights in North Korea. Scholarly in tone, this covers all the bases - including newer issues such as famine: the most basic human-rights abuse of all, both avoidable and its distribution in part targeted at people deemed expendable. This valuable publication has fortunately continued despite Kim Dae-jung's "Sunshine" policy, whose downside is a reluctance to press the North on human rights - and which has seen other official Seoul sources toned down and reined in.

Nor are abuses confined to North Korea's own citizens, though of course they bear the brunt. Poignantly, the KINU white paper lists by name hundreds of South Korean fishermen and others kidnapped over the years. Pyongyang's shameless abductions, recently in the news after long-rumored kidnappings of young Japanese, were confirmed, and deserve a column of their own - as do other specific areas. All in good time.

The latest additions are personal testimonies. Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, by Kang Chol-hwan, came out last year from Basic Books, which billed it as the first of its kind in English. Not quite. Soon Ok Lee's Eyes of the Tailless Animals: Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman appeared in 1999; but Living Sacrifice Books of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, doesn't have Basic's marketing budget. Both are harrowing accounts of vile cruelty, arbitrarily but systematically inflicted on the innocent. When Kang was sent with his whole family to the camps, apparently because his grandpa - a once-wealthy returnee from Japan - spoke his mind once too often, he was all of nine years old. Nine.

Human rights in North Korea: So what did you expect? The bad if predictable news is that the abuses are extreme, and endless. The good news is that they are no longer hidden. Bad news again: It's easier to read the chargesheet than to know how to halt this heinous catalogue of state crime. More on that in another column.

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