[imText1]On April 15, the UN Human Rights Commission passed a resolution calling on the international community to apply pressure on North Korea to stop its human rights abuses. South Korea, however, refused to align its policies with the UN resolution. Insisting that international pressure might provoke Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s dictator-leader, into tightening his political and social control over his people, rather than promote human rights, the South Korean government argued that humanitarian aid and economic assistance were the only ways to improve human rights in the isolated regime.
In taking its stand, South Korea fails to appreciate the importance of international pressure. The UN’s resolution is not the first attempt by an international group to apply pressure to North Korea, nor has international pressure over the past decade been ineffective. To the contrary, there is much evidence that international pressure has had positive effects for the citizens of North Korea.
Throughout the history of modern government, even the most ruthless dictators have been responsive to worldwide media exposure and resultant international action. Kim, who has worked long and hard to establish his reputation as one of the most brutal dictators in history, has proven no exception to this rule. For example, Amnesty International’s demand since 1979 to investigate North Korean detention facilities led to the permanent closure of a few camps by 1991, according to former prison guard Ahn Myong Chul, who defected to South Korea in 1994. During the mid-1990s, when North Korean defectors began flocking en masse to the Chinese border, many were captured, sent to gulags, or shot dead at the border. International pressure on North Korea and China to stop the oppressive treatment of defectors led to a noticeable decrease in the use of extreme punishment. Today, most captured defectors serve only a few months of imprisonment in labor training camps.
During summit meetings between Japan and North Korea in 2002, Japanese officials confronted Kim about Japanese citizens who had been abducted and detained in North Korea. At first, Kim denied their existence. Then, when the officials persisted, he came to admit his regime’s culpability, even going so far as to make a public apology. Kim’s apology confirms that even the most oppressive dictators are responsive to global exposure of their inhumane actions—a revelation reaffirmed by the fact that even after the Japanese abductees were not returned to North Korea after visiting their family members in Japan, Japan succeeded in getting further concessions from North Korea.
During the mass famine of the late 1990s, public executions by way of hangings, shootings, and burnings at the stake were staged monthly in every town as a means of suppressing dissent. The video of a public execution smuggled out of North Korea and viewed all over the world in March 2005 suggests an entirely new method of media exposure that has the potential to solicit a broad coalition of international support. Over the past few years, as international human rights organizations have been more consistently acknowledging the seriousness of public executions, their frequency in North Korea has decreased significantly. At a minimum, the smuggled film’s exposure to the global media should provide another deterrent to the regime’s use of public executions as a means of discouraging public opposition. At best, by revealing North Korea’s penchant for violence, the film could boost the ability of international human rights groups to rally the support necessary to deal a fatal blow to Kim Jong Il s regime. Presently, international exposure seems to be a sure-footed means of weakening the regime’s horrible machinery of terror—and the success of global efforts depend entirely on the strength of the international support garnered.
According to a traditional Korean proverb, “the frog doesn’t remember his days of being a tadpole.” Within the current human rights context, top officials in South Korea resemble frogs that do not remember the days when they urgently needed—and received—international help in their own fight for freedom against militant authoritarianism. Today, they disregard the fact that their brother tadpole to the north urgently needs the same kind of support from free governments worldwide. Now is not the time to dispute whether foreign pressure will benefit North Koreans. Rather, it is time for the international community to apply the pressure it takes to instill in North Korean society a doctrine in which human rights are respected, for the benefit of a people who may have never known freedom in their lifetimes.
Young Howard is a North Korean democracy activist. He is a currently a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.
