250 delegates from Australia and overseas attended the opening of the 9th international conference on human rights in North Korea at Melbourne's Grand Hyatt Hotel (20 March), opened by Australia's Foreign Minister Stephen Smith. Carl Gershman, the Chair of the National Endowment for Democracy gave an overview of the campaign for human rights in North Korea to the opening of the conference. Click here.
On Saturday morning (21 March) co-orginsers of the Conference, Michael Danby, and Prof Won of the Citizens' Alliance told an Australia wide radio audience (on ABC Radio National) what had emerged at the Conference about the most recent developments on human rights in North Korea. See below.
To listen to the interview, Click here To read the full transcript click here
An abridged version of this article appeared in the Jakarta Post April 11 2009 http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/04/11/what-do-about-north-korea.html
Thirty years after Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in China, which gave the world's largest Communist country at least a partly marketised economy and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and twenty years after the first free elections in Poland, which marked the beginning of the end of European communism, the world still confronts the dilemma of what to do to help the 25 million people of North Korea, the last relic of the high Stalinist era of the Cold War. Only in North Korea is the deadly combination of a totally repressive political system and a totally unworkable communist economic regime still in place.
The North Korean Gulag: Labour camps for pollitcal prisonors and catagories of people and their families deemed untrustworthy by the North Korean communists
Republished with permission from the US Committee on North Korean Human Rights
Kim Jong-il, hereditary ruler of North Korea, extorts aid money from the west, and then spends it on the world's most bloated armed forces while his people literally starve. His regime brands whole classes of its people as "objectively hostile elements" and treats them and their children as enemies. It has broken every commitment it has ever given to the international community, whether on human rights or nuclear weapons.
Last weekend 200 people gathered in Melbourne at the 9th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees. The conference was held under the auspices of the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington and a South Korean NGO, the Citizens Alliance for North Korean Human Rights. Many guests came from South Korea, others from Japan, the US, Canada and Europe. They included academics, human rights activists, Members of Parliament and government officials. The Korean community in Australia was strongly represented.
The conference was marked, I'm sad to say, by pessimism and frustration. North Korea continues to demand and receive large amounts of aid as its price for good behaviour, but it never seems actually to improve its behaviour. We heard strongly expressed disagreements among our Korean guests about whether the conciliatory "sunshine policy" of former South Korean Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, or the tougher policy of the current conservative President Lee Myung-bak, offered better prospects for advancing human rights in the North.
We also heard shocking stories of the plight of North Koreans - starved, regimented, deprived of the most basic rights, trapped in an Orwellian nightmare of lies and propaganda, cut off from the outside world. At least 250,000 people languish in forced labour camps, where most of them will die.
We were privileged to hear from three defectors from North Korea - one a talented pianist, one a painter. The third, Shin Dong-hyuk, is the only person known to have escaped from a North Korean labour camp. While their stories and their example inspired us, the fact remains that only a trickle of North Koreans succeed in escaping over the Chinese border, where they face a dangerous and uncertain future as unrecognised refugees in a country which does not want them on its soil.
Shin Dong Hyuk
For years the US, Japan, Australia, the EU and other countries have tried to persuade or bribe Kim Jong-il and his cronies to loosen their grip on power, to no effect. In his speech to the conference, Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith pledged to keep up Australia's efforts to bring about an improvement, but the truth is that no-one knows how or when this will be brought about.
The UN's special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, Thai law professor Vitit Muntabhorn had just delivered an official report to the UN in Geneva. So far he is not yet been allowed even to set foot in North Korea. Professor Vitit's language to the Melbourne conference was diplomatic, but his message was clear: there has been no improvement, and there is no prospect of improvement anytime soon.
Ministers and diplomats are constrained in what they can say in public, but some people at the conference had more freedom to speak their minds. Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, spoke of the inevitable tendency of all totalitarian regimes to erode, and eventually to collapse. Two outspoken academics who grew up in the Soviet Union said bluntly that no amount of persuasion or bribery would induce Kim Jong-il to moderate his regime, because he and the army-police apparatus he depends on care only about their own power and wealth, and have no intention of following either the Soviet path to dissolution or the Chinese path to reform.
The continued existence of the Stalinist regime in North Korea confronts people of goodwill with a terrible dilemma. If we cut the country off from all aid, in the hope that this will bring about the downfall of the regime, this will greatly increase the suffering of the people. If on the other hand the world engages with North Korea and increases aid, it is likely that the regime will, as it has done in the past, use that aid to bolster its grip on power, feeding the party and military elite and starving the people.
I would like to suggest some practical steps. One is that there needs to be increased pressure on China over its treatment of North Korean defectors. China must stop repatriating these people to certain death in North Korea, must recognise them as refugees, and should allow the UNHCR access to the border region so that defectors/refugees can be helped to leave for third countries. One speaker, Masaharu Nakagawa MP, a senior member of the Japanese Democratic Party, suggested that members of western Parliaments should press to be allowed to visit the border area, and this is something I will certainly pursue.
Another step is to create every opportunity for North Koreans to engage with the outside world and see that what their regime tells them about the ‘paradise' they live in is false. Even controversial economic engagement such as the Kasong industrial zone which admittedly economically props up the regime is subversive of the deeply isolated, wolkenkuckkuckscheim (cloud cuckoo land) that the half cult, half Stalinist regime forces North Koreans to live in.
Whether they come as students, diplomats or entertainers, every North Korean who is exposed to the outside world can become an agent of change when they go home. We know that North Korea fears human rights activism - that's why our conference was denounced by an editorial in the North Korean party daily Rodong Shinmun. We should do everything we can to increase that pressure.
Michael Danby is a Labor Party member of the Australian House of Representatives and is Chair of the Australian Parliament's Sub-Committee on Foreign Affairs. As Chair of the Australian Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, he was the host of the 9th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees
The Australian Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan drilled down into the horrors of the 300 000 prisoners in Kim Jong-Il's labour camps, click here
Earlier in the Commonwealth Parliament Michael Danby spoke about the Deprivation of human rights in North Korea, click here.
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Clive James, one of Australia's most celebrated expatriates penned the following poem in the Australian Literary Review. September 7 2007
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