One Down, Two to Go

It’s not only in the Middle East that Iraq’s election lights the way. Let us turn to what may be the world’s most abandoned population, 23 million souls living under a government that surely qualifies as the worst totalitarian state on the planet: North Korea.Long viewed as home to hopelessly brainwashed generations, marching in lockstep to the glory of the tyrannical father-son Kim dynasty, North Korea has been pretty much written off the world’s list of candidates for transition to democracy – at least by the usual sophisticates of world politics, at least for the foreseeable future. The vision routinely offered in seminars and lectures on such matters as East Asian security is one of a North Korean population that, if ever set free, would have no idea what to do except perhaps pivot as one, swarm South Korea, and devour its bounty like a colony of army ants – upsetting all sorts of cozy regional habits in the process.That’s one big reason why democratic states like America, Japan, European Union members, and South Korea have focused not on freeing North Koreans, but on wheeling and dealing with their tyrant, in efforts to contain Pyongyang’s nuclear bomb-making, war-threatening, terrorizing ways. Secretary of State Rice said in her confirmation hearings last month that she thinks North Korea can best be dealt with via “diplomacy.”What that means in practice remains to be seen. But let us hope that with Natan Sharansky’s new book, “The Case for Democracy,” making the rounds in Washington, Ms. Rice was thinking more of reaching out in any way possible to the captive population of North Korea than of pinning our own security on yet more rounds of those “six-way talks” in Beijing. Those are the spectacles at which the North Korean representative huffs and puffs, and America, Japan, South Korea, and Russia all dignify his killer regime with their joint attention, while the Chinese communists smile and serve tea.Not so long ago, this was more or less the approach of democratic societies, including America, to Saddam Hussein and the millions of Iraqis who in 2002 “re-elected” him president with 100% of the “vote.” The important people of global politics, at the United Nations and in many of the world’s capitals, dealt with Saddam; meanwhile, the Iraqi people, under threat of torture or death, collected their rations and either kept quiet, defected, or died at state hands in numbers that far outstripped the current widely reported violence.With Saddam gone, Iraqis now have opportunities that North Koreans – except the 2 million who were quietly starved to death by their own government these past 10 years – can only dream of. While Iraqis were wowing the world January 30 with their will to go to the polls, North Koreans, according to the state “news” agency, were celebrating the 40th anniversary of the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung’s “unforgettable” publication of “Theses on the Socialist Rural Question in Our Country.” Does anyone seriously imagine that is how North Koreans freed of their regime would choose to spend the day?While North Korean cadres were pondering the agricultural insights of Kim Sr., the regime of the current tyrant, Kim Jr., was busy cutting the rations of ordinary North Koreans – again – to half the minimum daily energy requirement, as the U.N. World Food Program director for North Korea, Richard Ragan, recently told Reuters.The classic answer is to send aid. Unfortunately, there is a mountain of evidence that this serves chiefly to sustain the Kim regime, which, a la Saddam, finds ways to divert relief to its own uses – one of those uses being to keep control over a horribly oppressed citizenry. When President Clinton cut a deal with Pyongyang in 1994 meant to produce a nuclear freeze while feeding the people of North Korea, Pyongyang predictably cheated on the freeze, starved the people anyway, and Kim Jong Il, who had just inherited the regime from his father, seized the chance to consolidate his grip.How to reach the people of North Korea is a tough question. But one place to start is by speaking the truth in our own capitals. That’s what Mr. Bush did in his 2002 State of the Union address, when he named North Korea as one of the three charter members of the “axis of evil” – along with Iran and Saddam’s Iraq. But this year, Mr. Bush said only that “we’re working closely with the governments in Asia to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions.”Trouble is, the source of the threat from Pyongyang is less North Korea’s nuclear interests than its government. Democratic South Korea has nuclear plants capable of producing bomb fuel, but we aren’t much worried Seoul is about to start dispensing bombs to blow us up. The great danger of North Korea stems from a totalitarian regime that must conjure enemies to keep its own grip at home. As Mr. Sharansky notes in his new book, “governments in counties as diverse as Cuba, North Korea, and Iran all regard inculcating hatred of outsiders as critical to their rule.”Short of war to remove the Kim regime, probably the best way into North Korean society is to welcome and encourage people coming out. That offers a chance for North Korean defectors to speak up, broadcast honest news back into the country, organize dissident groups, and seek ways best known to former insiders to communicate with those still trapped under Kim’s rule.Except the number of North Koreans welcomed by the rest of the world has been tragically small – amounting to about 6,300 all told, most of them arriving in South Korea over the past three years. That’s about zip compared to the number who would flee given even a whisper of a decent chance. At risk of their lives, an estimated 300,000 have in any case fled across the border into China.You might think that once they reached Chinese turf, an outfit such as the U.N., keeper of the 1951 convention on refugees, would offer help. Hardly. Since famine in North Korea and growing mobility inside China brought the first serious refugee influx in the early 1990s, the U.N. has engaged in what it calls “quiet diplomacy,” meant to persuade China’s regime to honor its international obligations and at least allow safe passage to these asylum-seekers, who have a fear of persecution deeply grounded in the likelihood that they may be executed, or sent to murderous labor camps, if returned. But so quiet is this diplomacy, so as not to offend China – which sits on the governing body of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and holds a veto-wielding seat on the U.N. Security Council – that nothing much has emerged from all the hush. There are no refugee centers for North Koreans in China; instead, there is a bilateral treaty with North Korea under which asylum-seekers are labeled illegal economic migrants. If caught, they are sent back.The result, as South Korea-based private American relief worker Tim Peters reports in a recent bulletin, is that even with help for North Korean refugees signed into law in America last year, the outlook for them “is indeed grim for 2005.” China has beefed up efforts to keep them out or catch them, posting more soldiers along the border, and adding roadblocks to detect private aid workers trying at risk of prison themselves to reach the border areas. From inside North Korea, reports Mr. Peters, he has been receiving accounts that “authorities have stepped up the monitoring and interrogation of families in which family members are unaccounted for.” That is awful news, because in North Korea, the regime imposes collective punishment on entire families.How the end might come for the despotic regime of North Korea, we do not yet know. It would be foolish to expect it will in any sense be easy. But it would be cruelty and madness, not to mention plain dumb foreign policy, to assume that 23 million human beings would not, like the Iraqis, welcome the chance to start the long labor of assembling a government of, by and for the people. If they do, the world will be safer for it.Ms. Rosett is a journalist in residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute. From www.OpinionJournal.com. © Dow Jones & Company Inc.

One Down, Two to Go

One Down, Two to Go

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