North Korea’s War on Women

Women also suffer the worst cruelties in North Korea’s prison camps. A woman named Kim Hye-sook told the U.N. Commission that “the women who worked in the mines of Political Prison Camp No. 18 feared assignment to the nightshift, because guards and prisoners preyed on them on their way to and from work and rape them.” Another witness “reported that the guards of Camp No. 18 were especially targeting teenage girls.” A former guard told of “how the camp authorities made female inmates available for sexual abuse to a very senior official who regularly visited the camp,” and that “[a]fter the official raped the women, the victims were killed.” A former guard at Camp 16 told Amnesty International that “several women inmates disappeared after they had been raped by officials,” and concluded “that they had been executed secretly.” Indeed, the Commission found violence against women to be pervasive in North Korean society:

There is also petty despotism that prohibits women from wearing pants or riding bicycles, or offers them a choice of 18 approved hairstyles, including two styles of lady-mullets, and several others that appear to have been inspired by the 1980s metal band Queensrÿche. And then there is the language North Korea’s state media have used to describe South Korea’s female President: a “whore,” a “political prostitute,” a “crazy bitch,” and “a dirty comfort woman for the U.S. and despicable prostitute selling off the nation.”

If ever a place could benefit from the ferocious hectoring of angry feminists, then, that place is Pyongyang. As luck would have it, Gloria Steinem is on her way there, but already, it seems that Steinem will overlook this historic opportunity to say a word on behalf of her North Korean sisters.

Next month, Steinem will arrive in Pyongyang as part of Women Cross DMZ, an event to “call for an end to the Korean War and for a new beginning for a reunified Korea,” and to hold “international peace symposiums in Pyongyang and Seoul.” The other 29 participants will include Code Pink Founder and 9-11 “truther” Medea Benjamin, Ann Wright (“Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden “may have a point on a few things”), Mairead Maguire (Israel controls “controls America’s policies” and “murdered” Arafat), Chung Hyun Kyung (“Life is an organism (or orgasm)! Multiply!!”) and the event’s organizer, Christine Ahn.

Ahn, a professional activist, has been campaigning for a peace treaty with North Korea since at least 2003, when she led the Korea Solidarity Committee, “a group of progressive Korean American activists, students and artists” in the San Francisco Bay Area who shared “a desire to debunk the racist portrayals of North Korea, and present a more critical perspective on the continuing North Korean nuclear crisis.” The KSC was also fond of littering its correspondence with words like “anti-imperialism,” “struggle,” and “solidarity.” Ahn supports the lifting of all sanctions on the North, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the South, and security guarantees for the regime in Pyongyang, even if North Korea keeps its nuclear weapons.

Christine Ahn and the KSC opposed human rights legislation that funded broadcasting to North Korea and provided for aid and asylum for North Korean refugees. She called one such bill an effort “by hawkish conservatives and Christian fundamentalists with the intention of bringing regime change in North Korea.” To Ahn, “In order to debate about North Korean human rights . . . [w]e must go beyond political freedom to include economic and social rights; we must discuss human rights based on history and facts; and we must prepare not war or sanctions, but a peaceful and inclusive base to improve human rights.” 

Not surprisingly, Ahn enjoys friendly relations with the diplomats posted at North Korea’s U.N. Mission in New York. This month, Ahn reports, “After I returned from Pyongyang, I received the following confirmation from the DPRK mission to the United Nations.” 

In another e-mail exchange last year with North Korean diplomat Pak Chol, Pak told Ahn,“We have no time for hating and killing each other. We should put an end as soon as possible to all those cold war legacies for good and pull together to tackle our common task.” In the same article, Ahn described how, notwithstanding the air-quality warnings of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and the pleas of her own family, she brought her two-year old daughter to Pyongyang, a decision that left Ahn weeping and her child wheezing in an unlit hospital room (but still praising its health care system, described as “crumbling” by Amnesty International). Her fervor undiminished, Ahn was back in Pyongyang again recently, where “she had meetings … with officials from the country’s Overseas Korean Committee and Democratic Women’s Union.” 

If Christine Ahn is a pacifist, she’s a selective one. In March 2010, the South Korean warship Cheonan exploded and sank in disputed waters in the Yellow Sea, killing 46 sailors. An international investigation team found that a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine sank the ship. Ahn has expressed support for conspiracy theories denying North Korea’s responsibility for the attack. In a subsequent op-ed, published inThe New York Times, Ahn referred to North Korea’s “alleged” sinking of the ship. 

When Ahn could not deny Pyongyang’s acts of war, she has instead justified them. To Ahn, the “root cause” of North Korea’s November 2010 shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, an attack that killed two South Korean Marines and two civilians, was the illegitimacy of South Korea’s claim to the disputed waters around it, the failure of South Korea to turn those waters into a neutral “peace zone,” and the failure of the United States to redraw that boundary unilaterally in the North’s favor.

In 2013, Ahn (along with Noam Chomsky and Judith LeBlanc, the former Vice Chair of the Communist Party) signed a petition for the release of Lee Seok-ki, a leftist fringe lawmaker who was recorded on a wiretap while plotting “an armed uprising in support of North Korea” in the event of another Korean War. According to prosecutors, “During the meeting, one of [Lee’s] deputies suggested attacking South Korea’s communications, oil, rail and other crucial facilities.” Lee’s attorneys called the plot a joke that the prosecutors took out of context, but the petition called the evidence “fabricated.” A South Korean court later convicted Lee and sentenced him to 13 years in prison. 

Unlike President Obama, and the heads of the FBI and NSA, Ahn also believes that the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures — and the accompanying terrorist threats against American moviegoers, and the chilling of free expression in the United States — was “clearly” an “inside job” rather than the work of North Korea. 

Ahn also calls Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program “the symptom, not the root cause of the conflict” between it and the U.S., South Korea, and the U.N. Security Council. She criticizes the view “that denuclearization must be managed before security guarantees can be addressed.” In a 2013 article for Foreign Policy in Focus, Ahn saw just two reasons for tensions with North Korea — not North Korea’s nuclear test a month before, or the missile test that preceded it, but President Obama’s “pivot” to Asia, and the joint exercises that U.S. and South Korean forces have carried on for years. Ahn has suggested that crimes by American soldiers are a greater threat to South Koreans than North Korea’s nuclear weapons. While Ahn defends North Korea’s military buildup, she wants to “starve the empire” by defunding the Pentagon. 

It’s the same story with Pyongyang’s willful starvation of the North Korean people. Despite evidence that North Korea deliberately squandered resources that would have been more than enough to feed all of the North Koreans who starved to death in the 1990s, Ahn decries “the assumption that the famine … was a result of Chief of State Kim Jong Il’s mismanagement of the country,” and assails “attributing the cause of [the] famine to an ‘evil dictator.’” She has praised North Koreans for “rebuild[ing] their devastated nation according to the juche philosophy that promoted self-reliance and national independence,” which she credits for developing the North into “well organized and highly industrialized socialist economy, largely self-sufficient, with a disciplined and productive work force” — emphasis on disciplined! — until it could no longer withstand “the stranglehold of the United States.” 

Instead, Ahn blames the famine on a combination of “geopolitical and ecological events,” including the collapse of the U.S.S.R., “droughts and floods that . . . destroyed much of the harvest,” and “economic sanctions led by the U.S. and its refusal to end the 50-year Korean War.” Ahn does not explain the meteorological miracle by which these droughts and floods struck North Korea for 25 consecutive years, rarely crossed the DMZ, and never caused a famine in South Korea. She never acknowledges that throughout much of the famine, the U.S. was the largest donor to food aid programs in North Korea, or that Pyongyang diverted much of the aid and manipulated aid workers into distributing it on the basis of political caste rather than humanitarian need — a practice that caused Amnesty International to accuse Pyongyang of using food “ as a tool to persecute perceived political opponents.”

Ahn seems unfamiliar with the U.N. and U.S. authorities that sanction Pyongyang — I’ve published a legal analysis of them and assisted with the drafting of a North Korea sanctions bill pending before Congress — but Ahn is far from alone in her wild overestimation of the sanctions that apply to North Korea today, or that applied before North Koreas 2006 nuclear test. Contrary to the received wisdom, they are far weaker than our sanctions against Iran or Syria, and arguably weaker than our sanctions against Belarus, Venezuela, or Zimbabwe. 

Hunger still stalks North Korea; as recently as 2012, some unverified reports claimed that thousands were again dying in North Korea’s rice bowl. This month, the U.N. appealed for $111 million for food aid programs, one-sixth of what South Korean intelligence believes Kim Jong-un spends annually on luxury goods, including luxury cars, yachts, “liquor, watches, handbags, cosmetics, jewelry and carpets.” This figure probably excludes the $300 million Kim spent in 2013 on a ski resort, a dolphin aquarium, a 3-D cinema, and a water park. If one tabulates the cost of the food without the UN’s overhead costs, the difference is even more striking: according to the economist Marcus Noland, North Korea’s food gap “could be closed for something on the order of $8 million to $19 million—less than two-tenths of one percent of national income or one percent of the military budget.” Yet Ahn recently blamed U.S. sanctions for restricting Pyongyang’s “ability to purchase the materials it needs to meet the basic food, healthcare, sanitation and educational needs of its people.” She calls the Obama administration’s enforcement of U.N. sanctions against North Korea’s weapons and luxury goods imports “problematic,” claiming that some of North Korea’s ships were either falsely accused of smuggling, or were carrying dual-use cargo — which is technically true of a cargo of MiGs and missiles hidden under 200,000 sacks of Cuban sugar. 

Meanwhile, in the last month, North Korea has deported two aid workers, a German woman and a Korean-American woman, who had worked inside North Korea for more than a decade. Ahn has not raised a word of protest against this.

 Women Cross DMZ has drawn a mixed reaction from the reporters who have covered it. CNN reported the allegations of Ahn’s pro-North Korean sympathies, to which Steinem responded by issuing a statement supporting Ahn. The Daily Beast’s Lizzie Crocker wrote that Ahn “has long been uncritical of North Korea, a country that has some committed some of the worst human rights abuses on record,” and wondered why “this group of women has so far been mum on the violence occurring at the hands of the Kim regime in North Korea: executions, rape, forced starvation, and enslavement.” 

By contrast, New York Times reporter Rick Gladstone wrote a puff piece that did no due diligence on Ahn’s background or motives, and never mentioned what the U.N. Commission of Inquiry found about how the North Korean regime treats women. He quoted several of the march’s supporters, but not one skeptic or critic. In a second report, Gladstone quoted another supporter of the march, who defended Ahn and Steinem’s silence about Pyongyang’s human rights abuses, saying, “When you go out on a first date, you don’t talk about all the bad things you did last summer.” 

One might better ask what any self-respecting feminist would be doing on a first date with a serial killer and abuser of women. One might also ask why we should expect a peace treaty to pacify a regime that can’t abide by an Armistice, five U.N. Security Council Resolutions, two agreed frameworks (one with Bill Clinton and one with George W. Bush), a Leap Day deal (with Barack Obama), the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. No self-described feminist could ever overlook Pyongyang’s odious treatment of North Korean women without forfeiting either her claim to feminism or her credibility. 

North Korea denies the very commission of its crimes against humanity, a sure sign that it means to go on perpetuating them. Perhaps asking Steinem to defy Ahn and denounce North Korea’s misogynistic regime is asking too much. But at the very least, she could demand that Pyongyang end its reprehensible treatment of its people, including its war on women.

Joshua Stanton, who blogs at One Free Korea, is the author of a new report, Arsenal of Terror: North Korea, State Sponsor of Terrorism.