By all means, read Melanie Kirkpatrick’s piece in the Opinion Journal “Unwelcome Truths: As North Koreans die, South Koreans look the other way” - it’s a pretty accurate description of the way things are here. Here’s some of it below:
Most Koreans are well informed about the brutal realities of life in the North but prefer to look the other way. It’s much pleasanter to contemplate reunification fantasies such as the one portrayed in a recent hit movie about a cross-border romance between a South Korean woman and a North Korean soldier. Last week’s chilling report on the North Korean gulags made it into some South Korean papers but wasn’t front-page news. Students demonstrated against Mr. Hwang’s U.S. visit last week, protesting his anti-North Korea message.
If the South Korean people seem indifferent to the plight of their brothers and sisters in the North, it’s in large part because their political leaders remain silent. President Roh Moo Hyun was a human-rights lawyer before taking office earlier this year but human rights north of the DMZ is way down on his priority list. To his credit, Mr. Roh is allowing Mr. Hwang to visit the U.S.–something his predecessor, Kim Dae Jung (another human-rights activist who lost his voice when it came to the human-rights horrors in the North) refused to permit for fear of angering Kim Jong Il.
The official refusal to speak out about the human-rights abuses of Kim Jong Il’s regime was on full display last week during an interview with the South’s minister of unification, whom I met on the day the gulag report was released. For North Koreans, Minister Jeong Se Hyun said, “political freedom is a luxury, like pearls for a pig. The improvement of economic conditions for the North Korean people is the most important issue right now.”
“Once the economic situation is improved,” he said, then North Korea can focus on human rights. As for linking any deal with the North to progress on human rights: “I don’t think it would be wise or effective if we try to negotiate the human rights condition or to pursue our policies with human rights as a condition,” Mr. Jeong said. In other words: Whatever you do, don’t annoy Kim Jong Il.
Like pearls for a pig? Readers of this blog know my feelings about Minister of Unification Jeong Se-hyeon, but not even I could imagine him saying something so callous. Fucking unbelievable. Look, I’m not in favor of negotiating with the North Koreans about human rights, mostly on account that I’m not really big on negotiating with the North Koreans about anything, and if you got to do it, you might as well discuss something you stand a snowball’s chance in hell of changing. But that’s not to say that I consider the basic human rights of the North Korean people to be any less important than the nation’s economic reconstruction. And besides, the two are intrinsically linked - North Korea’s economic collapse, including its chronic famine, is the result of politics. Without political change, economic conditions will improve only if the country receives massive inflows of aid from outside, and even then, the current leadership could hardly be expected to “focus on human rights,” something the Korean Workers Party has never done in the 55 year history of the DPRK. Anyway, read the rest of the OJ piece on your own.
(Hat tip to Solomonia)
6 Comments
The unification minister is one of those progressives
who think that the most urgent human rights problem in
the NK is feeding the people.
From that we come to the conclusion that Park Chung Hee
was a great champion of human rights.
I’ve come to think that there is kind of Finlandization going
on in South Korea. (Finlandization used to mean going too far in
taking the Soviet sensibilities into account [?짠?????쨔흹 ??졙??짢??? ????쨔???쩌 ?쨀쨈?????짼?],
and using the real and imagined Soviet wishes to one’s own advantage in
domestic politics.)
Dealing closely with dictatorships is sometimes not good for democracy.
The odd thing is, Finlandization (isn’t it great to have an international relations term named after your country, Antii?) usually occurs in countries that are facing an overwhelming threat from a more powerful country without credible defense guarantees from another great power. Finland, for example, having chosen the wrong side in WWII [through no real fault of its own, really, given the circumstances], knew the West wouldn’t step up and defend a Nazi ally if the Soviets decided to occupy the country (a distinct possibility in 1945) - perhaps more importantly, Moscow knew this, too, and Finland adjusted its foreign policy accordingly (how this affected policy choices in neighboring Sweden is also fascinating). South Korea, on the other hand, is not only stronger than North Korea, but also party to a mutual defense pact with the world’s only superpower, a pact the latter still seems quite intent on honoring. What this means is that from an international relations perspective, there is absolutely NO reason for South Korea to Finlandize - in fact, if there’s a party that should be Finlandizing, it’s North Korea, being as it is bereft of superpower allies and looking at getting gangbanged by the US, South Korea, and Japan should it make the wrong foreign policy choices. This is what makes the situation so frustrating, because you’re right - the more the North Koreans talk about their missiles and their nukes, the more the South Koreans appear to adjust their foreign policy taking into account Pyongyang’s interests and desires. And there is simply no rational reason for them to do so.
BTW, you may be right, too, by saying that dealing with dictators is unhealthy for democracy - George Washington warned of it in his farewell address - and frankly, depite being a geopolitical realist, I sometimes worry about the possible effects on American democracy that might result from Washington’s daily intercourse with the gangsters and thugs of the world.
You know, at this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Unification Minister actually was a Norkbot.
It’s absolutely infuriating to see the South Korean government act this way.
The South suffers not from Finlandization, but the Stockholm Syndrome.
I was thinking of Finlandization as a kind of a state of mind which follows from adjusting one’s actions to the real and imagined wishes and needs of another nation. In ROK there shouldn’t be no need for that, but to me it seems there is some, for example abstaining from voting in the DPRK human rights issue at the UN. And using the Northern card in the presidential elections last year: if Lee Hoi-chang is elected, the will be a war. Even if the geopolitical situation is different, I’m sort of sensing same kind of mentalities. (And a student movemement inclined towards a dictatorship rings a bell, too…)
Very valid observations - the only thing I’d add, however, is that playing the “Northern Card” is an old and venerable tradition in South Korean politics, and it’s Lee Hoi-chang’s GNP (and its predecesors) that turned it into an art form - only when they used it, it was more along the lines of “if you vote for a softy like that big pinko Kim Dae-jung, the North Koreans will attack.”