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WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
The Forgotten Lessons of Helsinki Human Rights and U.S.-North Korean Relations In the movie Lost in Translation, an aging Hollywood actor and a young American woman are thrown together in Tokyo. The city is to them a bewildering, alien landscape. We see Japanese culture through their eyes, and much of what they see appears grotesque or absurd. More clueless than ugly, these Americans are able to view Japanese culture only through the prism of their own narrow experience. If Japanese society can remain baffling to educated American travelers after decades of cultural exchanges—after all the sushi restaurants, the translations of Tanizaki and Murakami, the fascination with Japanese art forms both traditional (flower arranging) and trivial (Pokemon) in the United States—it is not surprising that the considerably more remote North Korean society can seem impenetrable. Yet however much our superficial view of Japan—which we tend to see in terms of timeless tradition (the elegiac) or hypermodern anomie (the comic)—is to be regretted, our relations with Japan are friendly. Our relations with a possibly nuclear-armed North Korea are not. In this instance, the stakes are too high to allow a simplistic vision of North Korea as “totalitarian” to define policy. Yet it is precisely this limited interpretation of North Korean society that is driving U.S. human rights policy toward North Korea, as revealed in the debate over the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004. This legislation, which is likely to be signed soon, attempts to insert human rights into the ongoing multilateral negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program—to the possible detriment of both regional security and the human rights of North Koreans. Neoconservatives and paleo-hawks, both within and outside the Bush administration, have taken a one-size-fits-all approach to North Korea patterned on Washington’s approach to the “totalitarian” societies of the Soviet bloc. Not only are the historical circumstances different, North Korea is not like the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe before 1989. Much is lost in translation, and bad policy is the result. The Historical Context The human rights movement grew out of the experience of the Second World War and the Holocaust. In the postwar years, developing countries, anticipating the end of colonialism, demanded the creation of standards for economic and social justice. At the same time, an incipient human rights movement began to promote the idea of universal human rights. Led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the U.N. Human Rights Commission managed to reconcile these two approaches by asserting a set of basic human values that transcended diverse cultural contexts in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was approved by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948.1 However, mindful of the issue of sovereignty, the commission made it clear that no state could use the declaration to justify intervention in another state’s affairs. Human rights became an instrument of U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s in the con-text of détente with the Soviet Union. In Washington, a group of Democrats who were liberal on social policy and hawkish on foreign policy coalesced around Rep. Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Deeply suspicious of the Soviet Union and opposed to détente, the Jacksonites pushed legislation through Congress in 1974 that linked most-favored-nation trade status for the Soviet Union to increased emigration levels for Soviet Jews. In so doing, the Jacksonites were aiming more at derailing détente than at promoting human rights, but a precedent was nonetheless established. Likewise, human rights were not at the top of the agenda when the Helsinki Accords were signed in 1975. The accords, a far-ranging set of agreements among 35 countries in Europe, North America, and the Soviet bloc, represented the high-water mark of détente. Numerous bargaining positions had to be accommodated at the negotiating table. The Soviets wanted their wartime territorial gains—eastern Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—officially recognized under international law. Advocates of détente urged an increase in East-West exchanges in trade, science, and education. Arms controllers aimed to achieve confidence-building mechanisms that would reduce the East-West military confrontation in the heart of Europe. And human rights advocates wanted the Eastern bloc countries to adhere to a set of principles guaranteeing individual rights of expression, assembly, and so on. The final accords did include human rights provisions, though no one in the West expected the governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to pay anything but lip service to the human rights protocols. The Helsinki process helped to illuminate the gap between official policy and reality with respect to human rights. But more than that, it proved to be an effective political tool. In attempting to hold their governments to their agreements under the Helsinki Final Act, dissident organizations in Eastern Europe found a new route toward regime change. Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotnikow) in Poland, and the Moscow Helsinki Group blazed a path that political dissidents followed in the late 1980s as cracks appeared in the Soviet edifice. Human Rights Watch and other human rights monitoring groups that were formed to gauge the progress of the Helsinki Accords soon extended their activities to other regions. The human rights movement in Asia also picked up steam in the 1980s. Various groups, both domestic and foreign, monitored the human rights situation in South Korea, Burma, and Indonesia (including East Timor). But North Korea remained a relative black hole. The Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee and Human Rights Watch/Asia did produce a book-length report on North Korea in 1988. But this report, which discussed the political stratification of the country and the punishments visited upon those who fell afoul of the system, departed from Human Rights Watch standards in relying on unverified interviews and secondhand reports.2 The authors of the report, like the U.S. State Department, depended for much of their information about North Korea on admittedly biased, fiercely anticommunist South Korean sources. What is known is that large-scale imprisonment and politically motivated executions were the norm during the consolidation of Kim Il Sung’s rule of North Korea in the late 1940s, and that in the long “cold peace” that followed the Korean War, political and individual freedoms were severely curtailed. In Kim’s North Korea, built upon the arid ground of Japanese colonial rule, there was no established civil society to contend against the imperatives of the central government. There were no large, semiautonomous institutions, like the Catholic Church in Poland, to vie for the sympathies of the citizenry. There were no minority ethnic groups, as with Hungarians in Romania, or competing nationalities, as in Yugoslavia, to agitate for their rights. And unlike in Eastern Europe, there were no armed uprisings, as in East Germany in 1953 or Hungary in 1956. There was no North Korean “thaw” that resembled the Soviet “thaw” of the early 1960s, no Pyongyang Spring that mirrored the Prague Spring of 1968. There was no radical accommodation with the market as in Hungary or Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s. North Korean students exposed to the “virus of 1989” when studying in Eastern Europe were called home and reportedly sent to reeducation camps. Nor were there public dissidents or dissident movements in the country. No reform movement within the North Korean Workers’ Party openly challenged the traditional old guard with “new thinking.” To use the social scientist Albert O. Hirschman’s formulation, North Koreans, except for the country’s top leaders, lacked a “voice” in the system.3 They could accede to state policy, keep quiet about their misgivings, or, if the rare opportunity presented itself, leave the country. Those who managed to do so provided the outside world with its only firsthand information about the human rights situation within North Korea. In the mid-1990s, when North Korea’s chronic food shortages worsened to the point of widespread famine, the state’s ability to control the movement of the population broke down. Pyongyang was forced to loosen its grip so that people could move more freely about the country to find food. As many as 200,000 North Koreans crossed into China in search of food and/or jobs. With the increase in the flow of people out of the country, news of what was going on in North Korea was no longer restricted to a handful of defectors vetted by the South Korean government. (And, presumably, information about China’s dramatic economic progress made it back to average people in North Korea.) In 1996, North Korea asked the United Nations and other nongovernmental organizations for humanitarian aid. Food monitors and other international visitors thus had an unprecedented opportunity to travel around the country and assess social conditions. The information on the human rights situation in North Korea that emerged in the mid-1990s confirmed earlier reports (by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.S. State Department) of the existence of labor camps for approximately 200,000 political prisoners (kwan-li-so) and an unknown number of general prisoners (kyo-hwa-so), detention centers for returnees from China, endemic torture, summary executions, and widespread social controls on speech, religious and artistic expression, and political assembly.4 During the nuclear crisis of 1993–94, when the United States nearly went to war with North Korea over the latter’s plutonium-processing capabilities, the issue of human rights was not on the agenda in the discussions between the two countries. The heirs of Scoop Jackson, who had generally acquired the label “neoconservative” to distinguish them from such “balance-of-power conservatives” as Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, did not have a place at the table in the Clinton administration. In focusing on security issues (with only a passing nod to economic issues), the Agreed Framework followed in the tradition of the arms control treaties of the Cold War years, not the omnibus negotiations of the Helsinki Accords. The agreement was basically a horse trade— U.S. economic incentives in return for a pledge by North Korea to freeze its nuclear programs. There was, however, no offer of U.S. carrots for improvements in North Korea’s human rights record. Nor did the Clinton administration bring up the issue of human rights when negotiating with Pyongyang to freeze its missile development program in exchange for another package of economic goodies. However, there were those in Washington and elsewhere during the Clinton administration who were uncomfortable with the U.S. government’s approach toward North Korea, which they viewed as a misguided form of détente, and they seized anew on the idea of linking human rights to a more hard-line approach toward a perceived enemy. Human Rights and Regime Change In the late 1990s, an informal coalition of actors began to advance the issue of North Korean human rights in the policy realm. One of the driving forces behind this coalition was the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which had been established during the Reagan administration in a bipartisan effort to promote democracy and democratic institutions around the world. During the 1980s, the endowment funded dissident organizations in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. As an alternative to—or, in some cases, in parallel with—the covert operations of the CIA, the NED was committed to accelerating the centrifugal forces that were pulling apart multinational communist states (the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia). Human rights were an important wedge in this campaign, for the issue afforded outside organizations a way to skirt the issue of nonintervention in the affairs of sovereign states and push for internal change.5 The NED was busy in the Clinton years dealing with the “transition” states that emerged from the wreckage of the Cold War. Though it had to fight for its existence in a memorable congressional debate in 1993, the endowment emerged from this scrape flush with funds. New horizons beckoned, particularly in Asia. A cold war was still being fought across the Taiwan Strait, and Laos and Vietnam remained nominally communist. But it was North Korea that represented the most provocative challenge to the organization. Unlike in the 1980s, however, when the NED’s support for the Nicaraguan contras found favor in the Reagan White House, the organization was now faced with a Democratic administration that, as the 1990s progressed, wanted to make deals, not war, with North Korea. In 1998, the endowment sponsored a conference in Seoul on the topic of North Korea’s internal situation. While South Korean presenters offered nuanced perspectives on the changes that had been taking place in North Korea as a result of the post–Cold War realignment of power and the mid1990s food crisis, NED representatives held to a narrow view of North Korea based on former Reagan official Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s famous distinction between authoritarian regimes, which could evolve, and totalitarian regimes, which could not. They believed that human rights would never improve in North Korea except through a change of regime. (The absence of any discussion of China and its evolving human rights situation was notable.)6 The NED’s view directly challenged the engagement policy of South Korean president Kim Dae Jung. This policy, a spruced-up version of earlier attempts at Nordpolitik, foreswore absorption of the North by force and favored the promotion of economic, political, and social contacts between the two Koreas. Culminating in the summit in 2000 between Kim Dae Jung and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, this engagement policy led to increased trade and joint economic projects between the two Koreas, facilitated an unprecedented number of reciprocal visits between North and South Korea, and considerably reduced the wattage of both countries’ propaganda blasts. Although critics of the engagement policy charged South Korea’s president with appeasement, during this period of improved relations Seoul maintained its military containment policy and its high levels of military spending. Between 1994 and 2000, with some exceptions, Seoul and Washington took a similar carrot-and-stick approach toward North Korea. The NED nevertheless aligned itself with “regime change” advocates against “engagement” supporters. It funded South Korean groups that were largely dismissive of Kim Dae Jung’s initiatives. And it maintained close links to several U.S. organizations that have taken a hawkish position on North Korea, including the Defense Forum Foundation (founded in 1987 and run by conservative luminary and former secretary of the navy J. William Middendorf), Concerned Women for America (whose mission is to “promote Biblical values among all citizens”), and the Institute on Religion and Democracy (founded in 1981 to take on the “secular agenda of the Left”).7 While these groups did not succeed in pushing the administration toward a policy of promoting regime change in North Korea, they did succeed in making it difficult for the Clinton administration to abide fully by its promises under the Agreed Framework. If the 2000 presidential election had brought a Democrat to the White House, the role of the NED and other groups opposed to engagement with North Korea might have remained marginal. When George W. Bush became president, however, a number of Scoop Jackson protégés returned to power. These newly triumphant neoconservatives were not interested in pursuing Clintonian engagement, which they by and large viewed as appeasement. After spending several months reviewing U.S. policy toward North Korea in early 2001, the Bush administration concluded that the leadership in Pyongyang was untrustworthy and a significant policy shift was in order. Instead of following up on the deal the Clinton administration was pursuing when it left office, the Bush team wanted to renegotiate the 1994 Agreed Framework and broaden the discussion beyond North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs to include troop concentrations and even internal changes. Given its distrust of Pyongyang and its view of the Agreed Framework as little more than nuclear blackmail, the Bush administration’s announcement in the summer of 2001 that it would continue to negotiate with North Korea rang hollow. President Bush, like his two immediate predecessors, clearly believed that with the application of enough pressure, and given time, the North Korean regime would collapse. After September 11, although North Korea was quick to condemn the attacks against the United States and signed several international protocols on terrorism, the Bush administration did not move to improve relations. Indeed, in rapid succession, the U.S. government identified North Korea as a member of the “axis of evil” and a possible target for a nuclear first strike (under the Nuclear Posture Review). The unraveling of the Agreed Framework—after the United States accused North Korea in October 2002 of working on its prohibited highly enriched uranium program and Pyong-yang’s subsequent condemnation of the U.S. suspension of fuel oil shipments—removed an obstacle in the path of those who were in favor of regime change.8 Heartened by the downturn in U.S.-North Korean relations, members of the religious and political right who wanted human rights on the negotiating table worked with such members of Congress as Republican senator Sam Brownback to hold hearings on the condition not only of North Koreans living in North Korea but of the many thousands who had crossed the border into China. The bills that emerged from this lobbying campaign—a Senate version that pushed hard for regime change (the North Korean Freedom Act) and a softer House version (the North Korean Human Rights Act)—attempted to inject human rights issues into the security dialogue with respect to North Korea’s nuclear program. Democrats and moderate Republicans preferred the House bill, and their view prevailed. In addition to including provisions that would make it easier for North Koreans to gain asylum in the United States, the North Korean Human Rights Act authorizes $8 million over four years for organizations promoting human rights in North Korea—presumably the very organizations that rallied support for the bill in conservative circles and among Korean-American churches. It also allocates another $8 million to “promote freedom of information,” including for smuggling radios into North Korea. According to the logic of this provision, giving North Koreans more information about the outside world will stimulate demand for change from within. A key element in the North Korean Human Rights Act links the provision of humanitarian aid to improved monitoring and distribution of food assistance. All nonhumanitarian aid—including, presumably, energy assistance that might figure in any future agreement between the United States and North Korea—is linked to the elimination of Pyongyang’s notorious labor camps and the decriminalization of political expression and activity. In the earlier Senate bill, the president would not have been permitted to waive such funding requirements; in the current act, these requirements are couched as a “sense of Congress” resolution and, as such, are nonbinding. Given North Korea’s refusal to discuss human rights in the context of the ongoing six-party talks (between the United States, North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia) with respect to its nuclear program, it would be unwise of any U.S. administration to follow Congress on this matter. Two groups tied by affinity and personnel to the NED had a strong influence on the thrust of this legislation, the most recent version of which has now passed the Senate and is awaiting the president’s signature. The first group, the North Korea Freedom Coalition, is made up of religious and politically conservative organizations, including the Christian Coalition, the Salvation Army, Concerned Women for America, and the Defense Forum Foundation. Much as it forced the human rights situation in Sudan onto the State Department’s agenda, the Christian right has put its political muscle behind the issue of North Korean human rights.9 Christian evangelicals from Korean-American and South Korean churches have long eyed North Korea as fertile ground for missionary work. They have distributed bibles in North Korea’s Rajin-Sonbong free-trade zone and sent religious tracts by helium balloon over the border from China.10 While some of the missionary work directed at North Korea is genuinely humanitarian in nature—such as the creation of an underground railroad to help resettle North Korean refugees— much of it is designed to evangelize among refugees or to prepare for wider activity within North Korea itself when the opportunity arises. The second group, more bipartisan and secular, is the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. It is led by former NED staffperson Debra Liang-Fenton and boasts several notable hard-liners on its board of directors, from the Defense Forum Foundation’s Suzanne Scholte to former Reagan administration official Fred Iklé. Prohibited by law from lobbying Congress, the committee has brought its influence to bear in other ways—for example, by sponsoring the influential 2003 report on North Korean human rights by former Amnesty International director David Hawk. The report integrated disparate defector accounts, showed satellite photographs of labor camps, and attempted to quantify the scale of abuses in North Korea; it received considerable media attention and contributed to the shaping of the current legislation. There is little doubt that the human rights situation in North Korea is grim. Even if the question were simply one of how to address this problem in the face of a recalcitrant regime, there would be no simple answers. When the question is complicated by the issue of nuclear proliferation, the influence of the religious right in domestic politics, and diverging views on engagement with the “axis of evil,” the problem becomes knottier still. Not least among the complicating factors is the mistaken belief of some groups—including the NED, the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, and the North Korea Freedom Coalition—that North Korea is susceptible to the same sort of pressures that were brought to bear on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Errors of Translation Basic human values may well be as consistent across borders as are the mathematical principles that underlie market economics. But whether respect for human rights takes root in a country depends to a great extent on that nation’s political culture. In the absence of civil society in North Korea, outside human rights organizations have no partnering opportunities. With the signing of the Helsinki Accords, Helsinki Watch groups in Eastern Europe translated the international language of human rights into the political and cultural language of individual countries. But any individual espousing human rights in North Korea today would be imprisoned and very possibly executed. (Indeed, even possession of a radio that can pick up Radio Free Asia may have similar consequences.) Human rights groups in Eastern Europe were able to communicate with each other with the assistance of outside human rights organizations. North Korea is isolated, however, and human rights organizations have virtually no leverage with the regime in Pyongyang. Some commentators have argued that, as with the Helsinki Accords, any agreement that comes out of the six-party talks ought to include a human rights component.11 Since the current talks concern a pressing security issue—North Korea’s nuclear pro-gram—a more apt comparison would be to the arms control negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. None of the arms control agreements negotiated in the 1970s and 1980s by the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan administrations linked security questions to human rights. Pressure for improvements in the human rights situation in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union did occur, of course, but within a framework of numerous East-West links promoted multilaterally (for example, the follow-on meetings of the Helsinki process) and bilaterally (such as through Ostpolitik). Engagement was sometimes confrontational, sometimes overly bureaucratic, but it led to real improvements in human rights. East European governments felt that they had something to lose if they failed to respond on human rights issues. No such engagement framework exists between North Korea and the other states in East Asia. With some exceptions, the push to improve human rights in North Korea is being placed against, rather than within, an engagement framework. This is because the real goal is regime change. Consider, for example, the provisions in the North Korean Human Rights Act that would encourage an outflow of refugees from North Korea. Advocates argue that the regime in Pyongyang will be susceptible to the same sort of pressure as that produced by the outflow of East Germans in 1989 on the East German regime. But it would be better to look at Cuba and Vietnam, where similar out-migrations only strengthened the regimes in power by serving as a safety valve against internal dissent. Moreover, encouraging North Korean emigration in the absence of mechanisms in China to handle the flow would raise expectations without fulfilling them. Nor is pressure from outside North Korea likely to be welcome among the citizenry. Indeed, given the strength of Korean nationalism, and particularly the North Korean variant that is fused with juche, a philosophy of self-reliance, such pressure may well backfire. Thus, we are unlikely to see a “velvet revolution” in North Korea. Some critics have accused the North Korean regime of genocide. But the regime’s human rights abuses do not sink to that level. For one thing, the North Korean government has not systematically targeted an ethnic group with the purpose of eliminating that group. Still, the government could be accused of carrying out “auto-genocide,” much like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. To make genocide a more credible charge, some critics have attempted to pad the number of victims of state repression by including famine deaths. As Senator Brownback said during a congressional briefing earlier this year, in speaking of the deaths that have taken place in North Korea over the last decade, “Two million people dying in North Korea off of a gulag or a political system or off of starvation is a horrific thing.”12 The suggestion was that the persistent food shortages experienced by North Korea during this period were a human rights violation rather than the result of systemic breakdown. But there is no credible evidence that Pyongyang has used famine as a weapon against the Korean people; its penal system is designed to handle all real or imagined threats to the established order. If the regime had intended to use famine as a political weapon—as the Soviet Union did to put down agrarian resistance in Ukraine in the 1930s—it is not likely that it would have undermined its doctrine of self-reliance and risked opening up the country to outside ideas by asking the United Nations and other nongovernmental agencies for help, and by allowing their representatives to set up offices in Pyongyang and to travel throughout the country. All famines, as the economist Amartya Sen has argued, have political causes, but this does not mean that the North Korean regime has deliberately attempted to starve the people into submission. The Right Policy Let us assume for the moment that aggressive promotion of human rights, accompanied by other measures to precipitate regime change (economic sanctions, interdiction of weapons of mass destruction, and military containment) succeed and, as the neoconservatives hope, the regime in Pyongyang collapses. So far, so good, except that the results of regime collapse could be catastrophic. Among other things, it could trigger an enormous humanitarian crisis. Millions of North Koreans suffer from malnutrition, and if the collapse of the government were to lead to the breakdown of the distribution system, many would likely die. South Korea would be hard-pressed to meet the needs of the North. (Experts estimate that reunification would cost Seoul about $1.35 trillion, or three times South Korea’s annual gross domestic product, which is one of the reasons that South Korean officials are taking a go-slow approach toward reunification.) Moreover, if the current North Korean regime were to collapse, it is unlikely that we would see a democratic government take its place since the North has no experience with democratic governance or opposition politics. It is more likely that we would see an even more hard-line faction seize power. And while the North Korean military is not in good shape, it still has plenty of weapons, including weapons of mass destruction. Regime collapse could well trigger civil war. The human rights strategy in Eastern Europe in the 1980s was aimed at improving the real conditions of people living in the Soviet bloc, strengthening indigenous movements seeking to liberalize society, and promoting regime change from within. Human rights activists in the West generally believed in the capacity of people living in these countries to bring about change themselves. A human rights model was not imposed from the outside. Rather, it was pressed from inside and sustained through engagement. The North Korean situation is not analogous, however, because there is no movement for opening up the country from within. This makes a policy of engagement all the more important, because it is through engagement that human rights issues can be raised and pursued—as the gradual improvement of human rights in China suggests. The Bush administration has generally viewed engagement with North Korea as a form of appeasement, much as the Right in the 1970s saw the Helsinki Final Act as a betrayal. The neoconservative heirs of Scoop Jackson are interested in human rights largely to the extent that arguments framed in those terms are useful for bolstering the case for toppling the regimes they oppose. They and their allies on the Christian right are playing a dangerous game. If the six-party talks fail, hopes for a denuclearized Korean peninsula would fade. And if the collapse of the current regime in Pyongyang were to lead to civil war or a takeover by an even more brutal government, North Koreans would suffer the consequences. In their belief that only confrontational tactics—all sticks and no car-rots—work against “totalitarian” regimes, the Bush administration and its supporters have forgotten the lessons of Helsinki. NOTES
*John Feffer is a Pantech Fellow at the Korea Studies Program at Stanford University and the author of North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories Press, 2003) and Shock Waves: Eastern Europe After the Revolutions (South End Press, 1992). [Go to interactive discussion forum]
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