With everyone from President Carter to Madeleine Albright to Bill Richardson having tried and failed to stop North Korea from building nuclear weapons, a congressman from the Bronx, Eliot Engel, yesterday jetted off from Washington to Pyongyang. We have a reserve of regard for Mr. Engel, primarily because of his clear-eyed efforts over the years to end the occupation of Lebanon and to hold Syria accountable for its sponsorship of terrorism. We have regard, as well, for the leader of the congressional delegation of which Mr. Engel is a part, Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania. Mr. Weldon, a Republican, has been a leading advocate in Congress for building a defense against ballistic missiles. But Messrs. Weldon and Engel and the four other congressmen who are accompanying them to North Korea are on a fool’s errand.

A press release from Mr. Engel said that the delegation “will meet with North Korean officials in an effort to improve relations between the two nations.” But improved relations between America and North Korea’s brutal, totalitarian government are not desirable. An improvement in relations would be a disaster for the people of North Korea, who would see the duration of their oppression lengthened and the communist military strengthened by yet more American food aid. What is desirable is freedom for the people of North Korea and the end of the tyranny there. Maybe Messrs. Engel and Weldon can ask their North Korean hosts for tours of the concentration camps where hundreds of thousands languish.

The Weldon-Engel mission is billed as a “fact-finding mission.” The relevant facts could have been heard at a hearing April 30 of the House Subcommittee on International Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Human Rights, at which a survivor of the Kaechon prison camp, Soon Ok Lee, testified that women there “were unconditionally forced to abort because the unborn baby was also considered a criminal by law.” She testified that “Women in their 8 th or 9 th month of pregnancy had salt solutions injected into their wombs to induce abortion. In spite of these brutal efforts, some babies were born alive, in which case the prison guards mercilessly killed the infants by squeezing their necks in front of their mothers. The dead babies were taken away for biological tests. If a mother pleaded for the life of her baby, she was publicly executed under the charge of ‘impure ideology.'”

This is the nature of the regime with which the congressman from the Bronx is seeking better relations. Defenders of the Weldon-Engel mission may argue that North Korea’s nuclear weapons mean that it can’t be ignored or that America has relatively warm relations with Red China, which is guilty of human rights abuses in North Korea’s league. We find neither argument particularly persuasive. There are ways to deal with the North Korean nuclear threat that involve ending the North Korean regime rather than improving relations with it. And the West’s betrayals of freedom in Red China are among the very reasons that the Chicom regime has been so recalcitrant in helping the civilized world deal with its newly nuclear neighbor.