Kim Jong Il’s envoys today will resume hearing the incentives the rest of the world would offer North Korea in exchange for dismantling the nuclear weapons program he pledged more than a decade ago never to build. Some people call these long-interrupted talks “negotiations.” We prefer to call the parley what it is, a shakedown. It will be hard the White House to characterize it as a diplomatic victory.

Mounting evidence illuminates the fact that the “Hermit Kingdom” is a hell on earth that responsible members of the international community have an obligation not only to disarm, but to transform. Its gulags are visible from space. There are credible reports that its political prisoners have been the subjects of chemical weapons experiments. Deliberate starvation of provinces has taken place.

Until recently, the political pressure for a robust policy to address the underlying problems of North Korea has been scattershot and disorganized. Last year, a coalition of religious and human rights leaders did manage to press Congress to pass the North Korea Human Rights Act. But the president has yet to name the envoy this legislation created, and nuclear negotiations will resume with no real plan for addressing the profound liberty deficit in this captive nation.

This may change soon. Yesterday more than 100 pastors, diplomats, scholars, and community leaders signed a statement of principles demanding, at the least, for President Bush to live up to his inspiring rhetoric regarding North Korea. Among the organizations represented are the Korean-American Church Coalition, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the Southern Baptist Convention. These are the kinds of large religious constituencies that made a difference to the White House in 2004 and can’t be so easily ignored in 2005. The coalition also has the benefit of Michael Horowitz, who helped organize the campaign that led to anti-trafficking laws and coercive diplomacy with Sudan.

Their action plan calls on the CIA to collect data on the country’s prison camps, the president to increase broadcasts of Radio Free Asia and Voice of America into North Korea, and Congress to at least consider a Jackson-Vanik-type bill that would attach penalties to our trade with China if the Beijing camarilla continues to repatriate North Korean asylum seekers to Kim Jong Il’s dungeons.

Some may scoff at these kinds of recommendations as soft-power demarches that have no bearing on the hard choices nations must make with regard to nuclear threats. But it will b e harder to gainsay the courage of the North Koreans who rise to these initiatives, which are the sort of thing that helped bring down the Soviet Union and South African apartheid. It’s something to remember as our diplomats meet today with the envoys of the North Korean shakedown artist.