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By Donald Kirk
We're accustomed to two basic stories from North Korea. First is the North's nuclear and missile programs. Kim Jong-un is forever ordering missile tests, and he may also be considering the North's seventh nuclear test ― which would be its first since September 2017.
The other story revolves around hunger, starvation and disease. One might think the North had learned enough of a lesson from the experience of the 1990s when famine wiped out as many as 2 million of its people.
But no, even as Kim was declaring he will soon put a spy satellite into orbit, we were getting reports that North Korea has quite a distinction. The North, while plunging into another period of widespread hunger, ranks first on the Global Survey Index conducted by Walk Free, an Australian outfit that's doing what it can to wipe out slavery all around the earth.
That's quite a tall order, which Walk Free undoubtedly will not accomplish, but meanwhile, it's putting out fascinating statistics on the levels of slavery in 160 countries.
The closest challenger to North Korea in terms of the percentage of people in slavery is Eritrea. In North Korea, slightly more than one out of 10 people are slaves. In Eritrea, the percentage is slightly less than one out of 10. They both rank well ahead of third-placed Mauritania.
However, what does the high level of slavery have to do with famine and disease? The answer is that North Korea desperately needs people to work in the farms, fields and mines while others are too ill and sick to do the job. The solution for the otherwise-impoverished country is to force about 2.6 million people to work for nothing.
Those numbers include hundreds of thousands in prison, caught up in ordinary jails or in the gulag system reserved for those who will never go free. They will, instead, work until they drop. Others may toil outside the walls and wire fences of a gulag but will always have to work for nothing other than the rations that will keep them alive for another day's work.
North Korea's record of cruelty to its people is hardly news considering it's been a fact of North Korean life throughout the history of the Kim dynasty, beginning with the rise of Kim Jong-un's grandfather to power after his return to the North on a Soviet vessel in 1945.
Still, it comes as a bit of a shock to learn, in this Global Slavery Index, that North Korea ranks ahead of all the Arab states and Russia, which ranks in the top 10. Asia Press, run by Koreans in Japan and also South Korea, reports extensively on the mounting hunger.
"People are too weak to engage in wage labor," says the report, based on surreptitious conversations on mobile phones sneaked into the North from China. "People are dying."
Amid such suffering, North Korea has difficulty finding enough people to enslave. Slave workers cannot slave when they are too weak to pick up the tools needed to till the fields or hack coal out of mines.
In Washington, the State Department regularly excoriates the North for its human rights record, but some ask why we keep beseeching the North to enter "dialogue" while failing to make human rights an absolute condition for talking.
The answer might be that of course North Korea will just go on denying the grossest violations of human rights and will also never give up its nukes and missiles. Given the dismal failure of all previous efforts at getting the North to engage in reform, why not stop trying?
There may be no other choice, but in the end millions more North Koreans will suffer. Besides forcing 2.6 million people to work or endure some form of servitude, the North has about 1.2 million people in its armed forces. That means about 3.8 million North Koreans are basically working for nothing.
The report by Walk Free is not the only report showing how conditions in North Korea are worsening even as the penalties imposed by the regime are, if anything, harsher now than a few years ago. A State Department report on religious freedom tells us that increasing numbers of North Koreans face execution for the sin of having been caught with bibles in their possession.
We've been hearing for years that worship of Christianity is a capital offense regardless of the phony congregations that appear at the Catholic and Protestant show churches in Pyongyang at services staged for the benefit of foreigners.
In North Korea, the story only gets worse.
Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com) writes from Seoul as well as Washington. He has visited North Korea nine times, most recently in 2012.
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