Since 2009, each edition of the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism has contained a cheerful fiction: State has given the nation that it insists on calling the “DPRK”—using the anti-democratic, anti-people, and anti-republican Pyongyang government’s laughable official appellation, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—a clean bill of health. North Korea “is not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987,” last year’s document reads. The country has therefore remained safely off the United States’ list of state sponsors of terrorism.
This year’s report, due to be released by April 30, will require a revision. For what last year was—at a minimum—a highly questionable judgment now looks utterly indefensible in the wake of North Korea’s brazen assassination of its dictator’s older half-brother at Kuala Lumpur’s airport on February 13.
In the waning days of his administration, George W. Bush removed North Korea from the State Department’s terror list. Pyongyang had been on the list since that aforementioned 1987 bombing, which killed 115 innocent people. Call it the audacity of hope: Bush figured that by rewarding Pyongyang with a delisting, the North Korean regime would agree to halt its development of nuclear weapons and allow international weapons inspectors inside the country. Like many dubious propositions, Bush’s move gained widespread bipartisan support. Then-senator Barack Obama praised the deal, calling it a “modest step forward.”
Four nuclear weapons tests later, we see how well the denuclearization component of the arrangement has worked. And in the meantime, North Korea has continued to aid and perpetrate acts of terrorism, rendering the claim that it “is not known” to have sponsored terrorism true only if one has never cracked a newspaper.
Writing in these pages in July 2015, attorney and sanctions expert Joshua Stanton noted that
North Korea has committed such acts in spades. Since its delisting, several shipments of arms have been intercepted on their way from North Korea to Iran and its terrorist proxies. In the first half of 2015 alone, at least three delegations of North Korean nuclear scientists traveled to Iran to provide assistance to that regime’s illicit nuclear program. Crucially, Iran (along with Syria and Sudan) is considered a state sponsor of terror, meaning that North Korea has certainly provided “material support for terrorists and terrorist organizations.” Oh, and in 2009, it was discovered that North Korea had attempted to ship more than 10,000 chemical weapons suits to Syria, another example of Pyongyang aiding a regime that the State Department considers terrorist in nature.
There’s more. Even before Kim Jong-nam, a prominent critic of his half-brother’s regime, was brutally murdered in Kuala Lumpur this month in a brazen public attack ordered by Pyongyang, North Korea was known to have committed or attempted to commit multiple assassinations abroad. And closer to home, the 2014 cyberattack on Sony Pictures, which was clearly designed to “influence the conduct of . . . members of the civilian population” by preventing them from seeing a movie that mocked North Korea, was arguably an act of terrorism.
Happily, some lawmakers are waking up to this reality, with several members of the House of Representatives calling for North Korea to be relisted. The State Department should heed their advice. Re-designating North Korea a state sponsor of terror would, for one, affirm that the truth matters: North Korea supports terrorism and it does no good to pretend otherwise. It would also be an important symbolic step in its own right and a sign of solidarity with South Korea, an ally that is feeling shaky about America’s commitment to it.
Relisting North Korea would have concrete salutary upshots too. As Stanton explains on his blog,
Of course, the most brutal form of terrorism that North Korea commits is the kind it perpetrates on its own citizens. Dictator Kim Jong-un—who holds the distinction of being a morbidly obese leader of a country that suffers from chronic food shortages—operates a slave state. Political, intellectual, religious, and economic liberties are nil. Hundreds of thousands languish in labor camps. That South Korea has over the past several decades blossomed into a prosperous and vibrant democracy while North Korea has remained stuck in Stalinist misery highlights the tragedy of the situation.
Anything that prudently moves us closer to the end of the North Korean regime is worth doing. Labeling North Korea a state sponsor of terror would be a small move, yes. But it would certainly qualify as a “modest step forward.”
