A 12-member UN commission has looked into the human rights situation in North Korea and has stated “The gravity, scale and nature of these [rights] violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.” These violation include “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence.” The UN Security Council will vote on sending this report to the International Criminal Court, but China will certainly exercise its veto. The leaders of the Beijing government will become accessories after the fact.
Commission chairman Michael Kirby didn’t pull any punches at yesterday’s press conference. He told the press, “At the end of the Second World War so many people said, ‘If only we had known, if only we had known the wrongs that were done in the countries of the hostile forces’ . . . . There will be no excusing the failure of action because we didn’t know — we do know.”
The report laid out the basic problem. The Kim regime spends “large amounts” of its small foreign currency reserves on “luxury goods and the advancement of his personality cult instead of providing food to the starving general population.” Elsewhere it says, the government spends heavily on the military “even during periods of mass starvation.”
Not surprisingly, North Korea did not allow the commission to enter its territory and freely interview prison camp inmates. Instead, the commission interviewed North Korean escapees in the west and in South Korea. One thing that kept coming up in this whole pathetic affair is the complicity of the Chinese government in allowing this brutality to continue.
Of course, the Beijing government is a blood-stained mob of gangsters who vary little from Al Capone and John Gotti in their morals. The Chinese Communist Party is one of the great evils in the world. Yet the People’s Republic of China (a dictatorship in which the people have no say) has opened itself up to the world in recent years, and there is a hope that it might start behaving like a civilized nation. In its shielding of the Kim regime, though, it has shown cowardice and a contempt for humanity that is low even by communist standards.
Businessweek stated, “The commission found that China forcibly repatriates many North Koreans who manage to flee and that North Korean ‘brokers’ in China routinely traffic women from the North into forced marriages and other forms of sexual slavery in China. Women who may eventually be discovered by the Chinese and repatriated often have their babies killed by authorities in North Korea to prevent mixed-race children, the report said.”
The Chicoms, though, deny that the red liquid on their hands is blood. Businessweek also offered Beijing’s excuses. “We cannot accept this unreasonable accusation” that the repatriations contribute to rights abuses, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said today in Beijing. “We feel politicizing the human rights problem does not help in improving human rights situation in a country.”
Typical communist thinking — pointing out evil is merely “politicizing” the matter. If the people of North Korea ever manage to string the Kim regime up like the Italians did Mussolini, there will be some people across the Yalu who deserve the same treatment.