Since the author references Escape from Camp 14 just as a reminder I will add this excerpt from Blaine Harden's book about the life of Shin Dong-hyuk because it is a stark reminder of what human rights are like in north Korea.
It was not meaningful to him that North Korea in the dead of winter is ugly, dirty, and dark, or that it is poorer than Sudan, or that, taken as a hole it is viewed by human rights groups as the world’s largest prison.
His context had been 23 years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to death, taught him to betray his family, and tortured him over a fire.
V/R
Dave
More Real Than Unicorns: The ‘Inextricable Link’ between Human Rights and Security in North Korea
December 17, 2012
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Guest Blogger
Last month, North Korea claimed preposterously to have discovered a “unicorn lair” in an ancient burial site. This month, there are deadly-serious reports of a successful missile launch. And so the world lurches again from laughing at North Korea’s curious totalitarian theme park and wacky dictator, to wondering with concern whether this leader, like the capricious child with superhuman powers in the science-fiction story “It’s a Good Life,” will destroy the world.
There’s seldom any middle ground, nor is there serious reflection about how to move past these disjointed extremes and reassert the comprehensive policy approach that has proven so effective in other settings. When speaking this month about the nearly 40-year-old Helsinki Accords process in Eurasia, for example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton invoked “an inextricable link between the security of states and the security of citizens.” The idea was first championed by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner, along with their colleagues in the citizens’ Helsinki movement. Without civil society’s control over the government, they argued, disarmament is not possible. It is now a staple of U.S. foreign policy that efforts to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles can and should proceed simultaneously with criticism of ongoing human rights problems in Russia. Yet while the human rights situation in North Korea is far more deplorable, the linkage between rights and peace is never made, and never becomes part of the public discourse.
Last April, the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights convened a conference in Washington with an ambitious title—Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Political Camp System and Calling for Its Complete, Verifiable, and Irreversible Dismantlement. North Korea was hardly expected to heed this audacious call, although those who opposed the Nazis or worked to dismantle the Soviet GULAG could provide helpful precedents. The conference featured a devastating report on North Korea’s prison complex, Hidden Gulag by David Hawk. Activists pressed the U.S. State Department to raise the release of the system’s inmates and demand the closure of the abusive facilities.
The State Department’s response on May 1 was limp: “The United States remains deeply concerned about the human rights situation in the DPRK, including forced labor camps. Promoting human rights is a key component of our policy toward North Korea, and how the DPRK addresses human rights will have a significant impact on the prospect for closer U.S.-DPRK ties.” But activists had hoped the plea would be made directly to the North Koreans in face-to-face talks. Sadly, human rights are not brought up explicitly, even quietly, as a matter of policy. Instead they are left to special envoy Robert King to raise in other settings.
There are a number of indications that Washington should be more forthright on the issue. More than 20,000 defectors have managed to escape North Korea, helping to raise awareness of the appalling conditions inside the country. And a new
There’s seldom any middle ground, nor is there serious reflection about how to move past these disjointed extremes and reassert the comprehensive policy approach that has proven so effective in other settings. When speaking this month about the nearly 40-year-old Helsinki Accords process in Eurasia, for example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton invoked “an inextricable link between the security of states and the security of citizens.” The idea was first championed by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner, along with their colleagues in the citizens’ Helsinki movement. Without civil society’s control over the government, they argued, disarmament is not possible. It is now a staple of U.S. foreign policy that efforts to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles can and should proceed simultaneously with criticism of ongoing human rights problems in Russia. Yet while the human rights situation in North Korea is far more deplorable, the linkage between rights and peace is never made, and never becomes part of the public discourse.
Last April, the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights convened a conference in Washington with an ambitious title—Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Political Camp System and Calling for Its Complete, Verifiable, and Irreversible Dismantlement. North Korea was hardly expected to heed this audacious call, although those who opposed the Nazis or worked to dismantle the Soviet GULAG could provide helpful precedents. The conference featured a devastating report on North Korea’s prison complex, Hidden Gulag by David Hawk. Activists pressed the U.S. State Department to raise the release of the system’s inmates and demand the closure of the abusive facilities.
The State Department’s response on May 1 was limp: “The United States remains deeply concerned about the human rights situation in the DPRK, including forced labor camps. Promoting human rights is a key component of our policy toward North Korea, and how the DPRK addresses human rights will have a significant impact on the prospect for closer U.S.-DPRK ties.” But activists had hoped the plea would be made directly to the North Koreans in face-to-face talks. Sadly, human rights are not brought up explicitly, even quietly, as a matter of policy. Instead they are left to special envoy Robert King to raise in other settings.
There are a number of indications that Washington should be more forthright on the issue. More than 20,000 defectors have managed to escape North Korea, helping to raise awareness of the appalling conditions inside the country. And a new
generation of South Korean human rights advocates—politicians, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and researchers—are tackling the looming issue of North Korea’s totalitarianism in a new way. They are reaching out to the global human rights community and attempting to internationalize the problem, avoiding the traps of North-South political dynamics and the Cold War categorizations that turn off the general public, particularly young people. In June, the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), a government-sponsored think tank founded to work toward a peaceful settlement, convened both international experts and South and North Koreans to raise internationally the issue of the estimated 200,000 political prisoners in the North’s prison camps and rampant, ongoing abuses against them including deprivation, torture, and rape.
(Continued at the link below)
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