What About Human Rights in North Korea?

Posted by Rachel Burger March 1, 2013 11 Comments 875 views

Yesterday, a group of independent human rights specialists called for United Nations member states to investigate the ongoing human rights abuses in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

What’s going on in North Korea is no joke. Allegedly, there are hundreds of thousands of people held in what have been described as “gulags” and “concentration camps.” These camps have been open since the 1950s and have been used as a tool for repressing any form of political dissent.

According to the UN article:

“Many prisoners have been declared guilty of political crimes such as expressing antisocialist sentiments, having unsound ideology, or criticizing the Government,” said El-Hadji Malick Sow, who currently chairs the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. “But all it takes to be sent to the camps is reading a foreign newspaper.”

According to the experts, up to three generations of family members of detainees are sent to the camps on the basis of guilt by association, or yeonjwa je.

What should we do when liberty is abused abroad? Do we have a moral obligation to help these people? What about state sovereignty?

State sovereignty and human rights have been diametrically opposed through much of history. The very definition of state sovereignty means autonomy over domestic affairs. Therefore, when considering intervening for human rights, one must make a choice: What is more important, a state’s sovereignty, or its people’s liberties?

Unfortunately, in the world of international affairs, reaching out to defend a people’s liberties takes a lot more than just slacktivism, as was seen with the “Save Darfur” crowd. It requires thinking about precedent, the loss of American soldiers’ lives, and paying for expansionary wars. The United States does not have the capital or patience for more war.

Sadly, this means that the United States should sit idly by while the DPRK forces its own citizens into work camps.

Human rights violations in Sri Lanka

This is nothing new. Should we intervene in North Korea, we should also consider intervening in  Uzbekistan, where there is compulsory sterilization and torture is common practice. Or what about  Turkmenistan? They purged anyone with Russian citizenship in this past decade and once imprisoned, like the DPRK, prisons suffer from overcrowding and inadequate nutrition and medical care. We should also consider the human rights violations in Tibet, Sudan, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Burma and Sri Lanka.

The frank and sad fact is that the United States does not have the resources nor the incentive to help these people.

So why do we always hear about North Korean human rights violations and none of the other above-mentioned atrocities?

Security.

South Korea and Japan are both under the United States’ nuclear umbrella; should any rogue state attack them, we have promised that we will respond with nuclear force. Unfortunately, the primary security threat to these two countries has been testing their own nukes for a while now, and this past month, threatened South Korea with “final destruction” during a debate at the United Nations Conference on Disarmament.

All of the press we are seeing about North Korean labor camps is meant to vilify DPRK. It is much easier to get a reluctant, liberal public to go to war if there are moral motivations in addition to security. Anticipate a greater call for intervention as the UN continues “investigating” North Korea.

The American people should not support intervening in North Korean labor camps; it is an excuse, like looking for nuclear material in Iraq in 2003, to preemptively invade the country, this time with the UN’s blessing. The American public should wait for North Korea to become an actual security concern for us or our East Asian allies. Ideally, however, the mutually assured destruction nature of nukes will prevent North Korea from acting beyond rattling its sabers. Indeed, by not intervening now, we may save more lives from deterring war than from intervening in the labor camps.

About Rachel Burger

As a world traveler, thrill-seeker, and nerd extraordinaire, Rachel brings years of experience making mistakes (and trying to rectify them) to Thoughts on Liberty’s readership. She considers herself a “compassionate libertarian.” Currently, Rachel is a master’s candidate at University of Chicago’s Committee on International Relations, which means when she’s not studying, blogging, reading, or discussing theory, she is eating or (rarely) sleeping.

Democratic People’s Republic of Korea dprk foreign policy human rights north korea Rachel Burger security

http://thoughtsonliberty.com/ Gina Luttrell

I disagree on the choice presented here. Whether or not we intervene ALSO has to do with our ability to affect real change. The number of times where the United States/UN has gone in to a non-western country for human rights purposes and actually done something positive, long-term? I can’t even think of one.

There’s a huge knowledge problem when we go to intervene in other countries with a different culture, political system, and way of life than we do—triply so when those countries have been cut off from us (and us from them) for generations. We simply don’t know, can’t know, enough about the people and what they want to affect positive change.

It sucks to sit on the sidelines and watch innocent people die, but the people who are best suited to help the North Koreans are the North Koreans, and most of what we would do would just get in the way.
- http://www.facebook.com/rburger Rachel Burger
  
  Excellent point, Gina.
- Sean II
  
  In general I agree with you, but it is important to keep the counter-examples in mind.
  
  The American occupation of Japan post-1945 was a huge success. Likewise our client state in South Korea. Both are way more liberal than they would ever be, if left to their own cultural devices.
  
  Normally I would dismiss Germany as a liberalizing nation which lost and then recovered its way, but in light of the Japanese example, it makes sense to consider that postwar Germany might also be a successful case of liberalism by conquest.
  
  Iraq is less of a disaster than I expected, but since I expected a perfect collapse into “Khmer Rouge meets Iran 1979″, it had nowhere to go but up.
  - http://thoughtsonliberty.com/ Gina Luttrell
    
    Japan didn’t exactly have anywhere to go but up either… But Rachel might be better to take on that claim than I am. Foreign policy, particularly foreign policy history, is not my strong suit.
  - http://www.facebook.com/rburger Rachel Burger
    
    Successful aid, as seen with post-1945 Japan and the successful Marshall Plan, makes up less than 3% of all aid given by the United States. While they’re examples of success, it’s an exception, not the norm. Not only that, but these states had infrastructure and culture already in place to use aid as the United States saw fit. That is not the case with modern aid giving.
    
    I’m a little unclear on your point with North Korea. Do you believe state-building, as seen with Iraq, is the best course of action?
    - Sean II
      
      I’m really sure I began that comment “in general I agree with you…”, which probably means I don’t need to be reminded which is the exception and which the rule.
      
      Look, I don’t want a North Korean intervention any more than you do, but I think it’s very important to separate facts from conclusions.
      
      If someone says “intervention worked wonders in Japan”, we’re supposed to say “yep, evidently so, but…” and then list our reasons for believing it won’t work somewhere else. But there’s no sense in pretending the counter-examples don’t exist, especially in this case, when you’ve got two of them sitting inside an 800 miles radius from Pyongyang. And most of all, there’s no sense assuming that anyone who points out “intervention worked wonders in Japan” must by that virtue be some blood-thirsty neo-con just aching for another round of shock and awe. We can admit an obvious fact and still yet keep our preferred conclusions.
http://www.facebook.com/kevinboyd1984 Kevin Boyd

“The American people should not support intervening in North Korean labor camps; it is an excuse, like looking for nuclear material in Iraq in 2003, to preemptively invade the country, this time with the UN’s blessing.”

With all due respect Rachel , no one is seriously suggesting we should go to war with North Korea. The Russians and Chinese won’t support it, and the South Koreans don’t want to bear the burdens of Korean reunification.

What’s more likely is the UN will send Kim Jung Un or whatever his name is a strongly worded letter saying he’s been a naughty boy and he should behave.
http://www.facebook.com/brendan.morse Brendan Morse

How about this:

We coordinate a military build up with the South Koreans and launch a massive war of unification. If we strike in the coming months, while they have few nuclear weapons and ineffective delivery equipment, this option remains open. The NK paper tiger would burn to pieces within a month. We give the Koreans and Japanese SLBMs, transforming them into great powers. Give Taiwan the same nuclear capabilities. Balancing coalition is formed, human rights violations go the way of the totalitarian regime…Chinese expansion will be impossible and the US can withdraw from Northeast Asia without having to worry about Chinese hegemony in the eastern Pacific. Hegemonic war can be averted. Much blood and treasure saved in the long term.
- Oppelganger
  
  Only two problems: their artillery levels most of Soeul within a matter of days, and tens of thousands of people die, while the Chinese reaction- calling in our national debt and ending economic cooperation with the American corporations now dependent on them for most of their manufacturing – cripples our economy and makes the regional build-up you’re talking about financially impossible.
  - http://www.facebook.com/brendan.morse Brendan Morse
    
    North Korean artillery would be mostly destroyed in a first strike scenario and artillery like air power, has little coercive capability. China can’t call in debt. They’re called bonds for a reason, they could sell them and perhaps drop the value of a dollar which would make the Chinese yuan less competitive. That would make Chinese exports much less competitive and ending cooperation with the US would devastate the Chinese economy.
Oppelganger

I take the central argument of this article to be twofold: 1) that human rights arguments with respect to the DPRK are, as elsewhere, deployed at the convenience of service to the realpolitik of foreign policy, and 2) that a realpolitik analysis of the cost implications of an interventionist strategy with respect to the widespread nature of human rights violations worldwide forces us to accept that we as a nation should not attempt to put a stop to them. I strongly applaud the first point, because we are often inconsistent and hypocritical as a nation with respect to whose human rights abuses or what types of human rights abuses our media, political leadership or conventional wisdom deem worthy of scorn, and I agree that a clearer view would recognize that these condemnations of human rights violations are deployed in service to unrelated policy goals. However the second argument is both morally wrong and terribly naive.

It is naive, because this issue is not about North Korea’s human rights record or its nuclear brinskmanship, but the fact that we have failed to normalize relations with them over 60 years after the armistice. Just as we could end Iran’s nuclear brinksmanship by forcing Israel to acknowledge and decommission its own nuclear weapons program (i.e. play by the same rules we say the rest of the world should), we could end the DPRK’s obsession with nuclear weapons and internal security by recognizing their government’s right to exist, notwithstanding their horrible human rights violations- but we choose not. Why? Because we want to reserve the regime change option. Comparisons with Iraq are inappropriate for two reasons. First, because any armed conflict against the DPRK would not be a unilateral invasion or declaration of war, but a resumption of the hostilities that were never properly concluded with a lasting peace treaty. Technically the Korean War never ended, only went on pause. Secondly, because implying that Iraq was a humanitarian intervention is to reinforce the mendacious policy gloss applied our initial justification for invasion was shown to be fraudulent. Just as in Afghanistan, the security justification for military intervention had to pivot to democratization because that was the only reason the American public could regard as sufficiently legitimate to justify the continued military occupation that our true strategic interests (which had nothing to do with either security or democratization) demanded. Unlike nuclear material in Iraq, however, DPRK labor camps actually do exist. Nonetheless, if we were to look past this and offer a final peace to North Korea, its propaganda machine would be faced with an impossible choice- ignore its most successful achievement, or accept that its justification for repression is no longer valid.

It is morally wrong to say that because we aren’t consistent in intervening to end human rights abuses everywhere we shouldn’t do so anywhere because the very notion of rights- that they are universal and inherently possessed by all human beings by virtue of their rational thought and human dignity- requires us NOT to accept a realpolitik analysis as a legitimate basis to abandon advocacy on behalf of those whose rights are systematically violated. Instead we need to look at the realpolitik in operation within our own country. The fact is that our political elites like Central Asian autocracy as long as it serves the imposition of our own worldview and policy goals. We need military bases to continue our occupation of Afghanistan and to find ways around Russia’s control of oil and gas transmission lines. We don’t mind the wage slavery we turn a blind eye to because it makes our food and clothes cheap and our corporate profits heftier. It is not that we don’t have the resources to help these people, it is that our own political elites have a tacit agreement with the governments in these other nations mentioned not to disturb their governments’ exploitation if they don’t disturb that of our government. I agree that military interventionism is not the answer, but neither is throwing up our hands and accepting that some rights violations are not worthy of acknowledgement.

The only option that is both morally consistent and not naive to the current political reality both at home and around the world is to call ourselves out on our own hypocrisy by examining the actions of our government around the world against the rhetoric we tell ourselves and others. It is recognizing that by not strongly repudiating the legitimacy of the concept of regime change, while maintaining the worlds largest nuclear arsenal, a military larger than the next 15 combined (most of whom are our allies), and by having a gun industry that exports more small arms fueling more low-level conflict than any other nation, that WE are the ones most contributing to a nuclear arms race and instability around the world. It is recognizing, for example, that incarcerating a higher proportion of our own citizens than any other nation on the planet, we are the world’s largest prison state, and that the war on drugs serves as a means of social control at home and a leverage of power through military co-operation abroad. It is recognizing that our non-discussion of human rights abuses both at home and outside of the Middle East or the DPRK amounts to a propoganda that is even more effective than anything existing under communism, because it is one we as citizens fail to realize exists. It is operating on us every single time we turn on the “news” and are shielded from the human rights abuses it is inconvenient for our own ruling political elites to make us aware of.

It is only when we as citizens liberate our own minds, actions, and politics that we can begin to expect our rights and freedoms will serve as an example that oppressed citizens around the world. It is only then that we will empower them to emulate our freedoms and take risks to agitate towards systemic change without fear of being accused of serving the foreign policy goals of our own nation’s political elite. It is only then that our nation (not our government or governmental system) will once again truly serve as a light of freedom to the world.