Clinton Strikes Blow for Norths Human Rights
By Rabbi Abraham Cooper
Give Hillary Clinton her due. Her first overseas foreign policy trip as secretary of state pits her against an adversary, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who over the last 16 years effectively took both the Clinton and Bush administrations to the cleaners.
Despite profoundly different worldviews, the United States has played pretty much the same cards at the six-party table. The main goal: securing a nuclear-defanged North Korea.
``Complications," like human rights, were effectively sidelined. Incredibly, some ``Korean experts" are pushing hard for Secretary Clinton to pursue the same approach.
Nuclear deal, uber alles. They still imagine that North Korea has the same objectives as we do: that Pyongyang wants to seek benefits for their starving people, that it wants to advance economically, and that it pursues political objectives because of nationalistic fervor.
And, most dangerously, some experts dismiss the regime's missile-rattling as merely a means to attract attention and extract a higher price when they eventually give up their nuclear bargaining chips. The operative assumption is that they, like us, ultimately want to succeed in achieving a negotiated agreement.
But in pursuit of the prize, we have ignore Pyongyang's statements that they will never compromise on military objectives and will never relent on its nuclear program.
We have failed to recognize that the North Koreans leverage the process of negotiations to get benefits, while using any pretext to avoid fulfilling verifiable agreements on the issues that trouble the rest of the world.
If this process also degrades our alliances with Japan and South Korea and stymies the advance of good relations and China, their true objectives ― putting us and our regional friends in a difficult position ― will have been achieved … again.
By exclusively pursuing the nuclear tail around the six-party table, we have also contributed to the horrible suffering of the people of North Korea and degraded the United States' long-standing commitment to fundamental human rights.
Like the inmates of the Soviet Gulag or the Nazi concentration camps of the 1930s, about 200,000 to 300,000 hapless victims in North Korean camps wait for help.
Every day, they are forced to renounce their very humanity. How else to survive when prison guards threaten to chop off a child's hand to force a confession from a parent?
Why doesn't that guard, or those who've run gas chambers or performed experiments on political prisoners, have any reason to fear punishment under international law?
Our silence to these and other outrages is perhaps Pyongyang's greatest victory to date. We want them to dispose of fearsome weapons ― they want our silence.
And too often, we have acquiesced. For the past two years we have let Japan go it alone in its fight to bring back citizens who were abducted by North Korea, kidnapped as they walked the streets of their hometowns in Japan.
As many as 80 Japanese are estimated to have been taken against their will to North Korea, where they are forced to train North Korean spies, enter arranged marriages and serve other interests of the Kim Jong-il regime. Kim himself admitted to 13 abductions.
In our eagerness to obtain that elusive agreement in which we imagine North Korea might divest itself of a bargaining chip it has devoted decades to develop at great expense, we sacrifice our own commitment to human rights.
The logic of doing so was never stated more vapidly than in the written statement of a private witness at last week's hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee: ``Japan will continue to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution when it comes to engaging North Korea, despite being one of our most important allies. By allowing the abduction of a handful of its citizens decades ago to dominate all policy considerations when it comes to the North, Tokyo has become irrelevant at the nuclear talks," the statement said, implying that being part of a negotiating process should outweigh a nation's interest in the rights of its own citizens. Thankfully, Hillary Clinton disagrees.
Secretary Clinton's visit to Asia is extremely important. So far, she's been making it clear that we are willing to negotiate with North Korea, but at the same time, by meeting with the families of some of the abductees, she is signaling that the United States will no longer abandon them or our fundamental values.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and a board member of the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. He has traveled extensively in the region and debriefed North Korean defectors who claim to have run gas chambers and medical experiments on political prisoners in North Korean gulags. He can be reached at acooper@wiesenthal.com