Bracketing Pyongyang

Editorial of The New York Sun
June 17, 2005

All those who underestimated the sagacity of President Bush going into the election - and overestimated that of Senator Kerry - could do a lot worse than wake up to an emerging pattern in the administration's approach to communist North Korea. For in recent weeks, the Bush administration has solidified its posture toward North Korea in a way that suggests a new willingness to confront one of the most intractable problems on the planet.

On May 30, Vice President Cheney called the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il, "one of the world's more irresponsible leaders" in a CNN interview. "He runs a police state," said Mr. Cheney. "He's got one of the most heavily militarized societies in the world. The vast bulk of his population live in abject poverty and stages of malnutrition. He doesn't take care of his people at all. And he obviously wants to throw his weight around and become a nuclear power."

Secretary Rice in an MSNBC interview Monday got more specific. North Koreans, she said, have "suffered under this regime. You're talking about malnutrition rates that have led to literal height and weight differentials that are dramatic between the South Korean population, which is well nourished, and the North Korean population that is not. The sad thing is that, while the North Korean regime seeks nuclear weapons, its population is still totally dependent on food aid to try and deal with its malnutrition."

President Bush met in the Oval Office the same day with a North Korean defector, Kang Chol-hwan, who spent 10 years in a forced labor camp. Mr. Kang's memoir, "The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag," so impressed Mr. Bush that he has recommended it to other members of his administration. "If Kim Jong-il knew I met you," the president reportedly asked Mr. Kang, "don't you think he'd hate this?" And Mr. Kang, according to a Washington Post dispatch, responded, "The people in the concentration camps will applaud."

The meeting between Messrs. Bush and Kang put the issue of human rights in the regional spotlight, calling into question South Korea's conciliatory posture toward the North. "This is one event that has gotten our attention," editorialized South Korea's leading newspaper, JoongAng Daily. "Our government has looked the other way on North Korean human rights, for fear of agitating the North ... What excuse can we give to the people who are suffering? Human rights is an issue on which there can be no compromise."

It is clearly emerging that the administration's approach is premeditated and coordinated among its top officials. Yet it has triggered a backlash among the establishment, with a chorus emerging for the idea of scuttling talk of human rights and returning to a policy of appeasement. North Korea's belligerence, Selig Harrison wrote in the Washington Post last week, "is the direct result of the Bush administration's ideologically driven North Korea policy and can be reversed only if the United States makes a fresh start attuned to the conciliatory engagement approach now being pursued by South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun."

Brent Scowcroft and Daniel Poneman called in the Wall Street Journal for offering Pyongyang "security assurances, economic cooperation, and diplomatic recognition - in exchange for North Korea's complete and verifiable elimination of its nuclear weapons program." The regime, presumably, would be free to build more concentration camps. At a hearing Tuesday, Senator Biden and other Democrats suggested that America shift toward a policy of offering direct economic aid to North Korea or holding bilateral talks outside the six-party process.

Our bet here is that Mr. Bush and his colleagues are way ahead of their detractors. One of the architects of last year's North Korea Human Rights Act, Michael Horowitz, a former official of the Reagan administration who is now with the Hudson Institute, told us, "If the only thing on the table is WMD issues, then in the end we are financing the construction of more Auschwitzes and more gas chambers and more starvation." Too many voices regard the North Korea matter as "a zero-sum process," said Mr. Horowitz, in which the choices are either to reward North Korea for violating its prior commitments or appearing indifferent to the threat of nuclear proliferation.

What needs to be done here is to deny the legitimacy of the enemy regime. "The objective of U.S. policy should be to undermine the regime, embarrass it with its own people, and help the world understand how bad the regime in Pyongyang is," argues a former deputy director of East Asian and Pacific affairs at the Pentagon, Chuck Downs, who wrote a book on North Korea's negotiating strategy. He reckons that the six-party process is necessary to keep lines of communication open in the region, but ultimately no agreement will disarm North Korea. "What is likely to come out of the negotiating process is recognition of how unyielding North Korea is, and how they really will not abide by the international safeguards they have signed onto for the peaceful use of nuclear technology."

That will be a useful lesson, and hopefully will focus the world's attention on what negotiations can accomplish. Refugees are becoming a crisis. A United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, Vitit Muntarbhorn, earlier this week urged the international community to "encourage China to adopt a balanced and humane approach" to refugees fleeing persecution in North Korea. The Chinese government routinely hunts down North Korean escapees who have fled into China, arrests them, and deports them back to Pyongyang.

According to a State Department report to Congress submitted in March, Beijing is violating at least four articles of the 1951 Convention on Refugees with its treatment of the North Korean escapees. Yet more significant than the U.N.'s work is the Bush administration's decision to appoint a New York lawyer, Jay Lefkowitz, to be the president's special envoy on human rights in North Korea, a post created last October when Mr. Bush signed the North Korea Human Rights Act. There has been nary a peep about the forthcoming appointment in the Washington Post, the New York Times, or the Los Angeles Times. We predict things will start to change. It will become clear that Mr. Bush is playing in respect of North Korea a much cagier game than has so far been appreciated.