By Jeff Jacoby
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
CLIVE CROOK, who for many years was a senior editor at
The Economist, wrote the other day that he used to think his finest moment at
the magazine was in June 2000, when he approved what became one of the most
memorable covers in the publication's history — a photo of North Korea's ruler
Kim Jong Il, "looking wonderfully absurd" as he waved stiffly to an
audience. The headline above the picture: "Greetings, earthlings."
Now, having read the new UN report on the Kim regime's
institutionalized barbarity, Crook feels a "pang of shame" at the
thought of that cover. North Korea jokes no longer seem so funny.
Indeed. It has been known for years that North Korea is a
totalitarian hellhole ruled by megalomaniacs who have turned the country into a
vast concentration camp. Millions of North Koreans have died from starvation
caused by their government's deranged policies; millions more have been victimized
by its fanatic efforts to repress any hint of independent thought, and by its
merciless assaults on human dignity. But the report issued by the UN panel this
month, after a year-long investigation that gathered evidence from more than
320 victims and witnesses, paints such an extensive and meticulous portrait of
evil that it compares in significance, as the Washington Post observed, to
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's devastating history of the Soviet labor camps, The
Gulag Archipelago.
The UN inquiry, headed by former Australian Supreme Court
Justice Michael Kirby, concluded that "the gravity, scale, and
nature" of North Korea's enormities are without parallel anywhere today.
Of course there is no shortage of human-rights-abusing dictatorships, not in a world
that contains the likes of Syria, China, Pakistan, and Iran. But as Kirby's
commission documents, North Korea's savageries are not "mere excesses of
the state." They go the essence of an ideological system that the world
has tolerated for more than half a century. And the horrors that system has
spawned are comprehensive in their scope:
"These crimes against humanity," the report concludes, "entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation."
At more than 400 pages, the commission's findings make an
admittedly long and grisly read. But you can open it at random to almost any
page and get a taste of the sadistic misery that is life in North Korea.
A single example: In a section discussing the treatment
of "repatriated" escapees — North Korean refugees caught in China and
forcibly returned — the commission recounts the special cruelties inflicted on
pregnant women. In most cases the women were forced to undergo abortions,
sometimes induced through methods as violent and primitive "as beating,
kicking, and otherwise traumatizing the pelvic and abdominal areas" until
miscarriage resulted. When a woman managed to carry her baby to full term, witnesses
testified, security guards ordered "the mother or a third person to kill
the baby by drowning it in water or suffocating it."
What will it take to make North Korea's human-rights
atrocities a matter of urgency for the free world? The country's horrendous concentration
camps, where innocent victims by the hundreds of thousands have been starved,
tortured, and worked to death, have lasted twice as long as theSoviet gulag
did, and 12 times as long as the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Nelson Mandela
spent 27 years in prison, and people the world over rallied for his freedom. In
the 1980s, anti-apartheid protesters maintained a non-stop vigil, 24/7, outside
South Africa's embassy in London, refusing to leave until Mandela was released.
Who rallies for the freedom of North Korea's martyrs? Where are the non-stop
vigils for them?
"We should be ashamed," says Justice Kirby,
"if we do not act on this report."
The UN findings have triggered fresh calls for financial
sanctions against North Korea. Some experts insist that severing Pyongyang's
access to the global banking networks could compel the regime to reform. But
sanctions alone will never do the trick. No regime so monstrous will ever stand
down until the civilized world first resolves, with unmistakable conviction, to
effect its replacement. That means acknowledging that Pyongyang's evil goes to
its very essence — and feeling a "pang of shame" at how long we have
allowed that evil to persist.
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