Is There Any Way To Help The People Of North Korea?
How does one get the measure of Kim Jong Il’s legacy in North Korea? His victims, like those of his father before him, are so many, in lives ended and lives stunted, that they become faceless and formless in our minds, like those tens of thousands of dancers in the mass performances Kim liked to stage. An Egyptian protester beaten, a Burmese dissident imprisoned, a Chinese blogger censored—such singular injustices are easier to grasp, and thus more likely to make us angry, and to spur us to act. The North Korean regime has been protected by the sheer enormity of its crimes, which discrete images cannot easily capture. Of course, picturing life and death in North Korea is also hard because the government isolated the country from the outside world, forbidding its people from leaving, or from speaking to the tiny handful of foreigners who were allowed in. But in recent years, life for North Koreans has gotten so miserable that many have risked torture and execution to escape the country. And they have brought their stories with them.
So now we know that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have perished there from preventable starvation. We know about the kwanliso camps for alleged enemies of the state, where an estimated 200,000 North Koreans continue to work and die in conditions of near starvation and brutal abuse. In this system, the sins of one person condemn his or her entire family to imprisonment; even children born inside such camps grow up to inherit their parents’ prisoner status. We know as well that millions of North Koreans have grown up and grown old with a government that seeks to control every aspect of their lives, demanding not just obedience in action but devotion in thought, denying them not just the right to demand an alternative way of life, but the ability even to imagine one. Past dictators have tried to do the same—Pol Pot in Cambodia, Stalin in the Soviet Union. But none sustained the experiment for 60 years, as the Kims have done in North Korea. Most North Koreans have no memory of living in a different kind of society. Theirs may be the most fully realized totalitarian state in human history.
The magnitude of the suffering begs the question: What more should we have been doing all these years to help the North Korean people?
It is my job at Human Rights Watch to try to answer this question with respect to many repressive countries around the world. I’ve always had a hard time coming up with a satisfactory answer for North Korea, which seems, at first glance, so utterly beyond any outsider’s capacity to influence. Some thought that economic failure and famine would force the regime’s collapse during the 1990s. This was wrong. If anything, hunger strengthens repressive states’ hold on their subjects. It saps people’s strength, forces them to focus on day to day survival, and makes them dependent upon their leaders, who control the distribution of food, and thus even more helpless before them. This is one reason, beyond the obvious humanitarian imperative, why withholding food aid from North Korea has always been unhelpful in improving respect for human rights (though we should obviously monitor how that aid is distributed).
So contrary to my usual instinct in such cases, I’ve believed that the more the West engages the North Korean government the better. North Korea’s self-isolation has been a deliberate defense mechanism against a political awakening by its people. Anything that brings information to them—whether radio broadcasts from the outside, or getting diplomats, aid workers, and journalists inside—anything, in other words, that helps to bring North Korea out of solitary confinement, can only help.
The international community could also have done more over the years to call out Kim Jong Il for his brutality. The conventional wisdom is that he would not have cared, that talking more in public about human rights, or pressing North Korean leaders directly on issues like labor camps, would have done nothing for the country’s people, while making diplomacy even more difficult. This sense of futility became another reason to push North Korea’s horrors from the forefront of our minds. Kim Jong Il became more often a subject of ridicule from the outside world, with his bouffant haircut, and retro-Soviet propaganda slogans, than of condemnation—his wackiness was a distraction and thus also a source of protection (see the last decade’s worth the Onion’s headlines on North Korea, “Kim Jong Il ends Nuclear Program for Lead in Next Batman Movie!” and the latest “Kim Jong Un Privately Expresses Doubt he’s Crazy Enough to Run North Korea”).