Herewith a few subjects pertaining to North Korea that have all but vanished from public discourse: the country’s gulag (thought to hold upwards of 200,000 political prisoners); chronic malnutrition in the countryside while a ruthless dictator grows morbidly obese; and intensified efforts to repatriate refugees from China to North Korea, where they face an unimaginably cruel fate.
There are a few obvious reasons for the world’s worst human rights situation to have fallen off the global agenda—they are not limited just to whatever Donald Trump tweeted a few minutes ago.
For one, South Korea’s new president Moon Jae-in displays the odd pathology that afflicts much of his country’s political left. Moon and his cohort opposed South Korea’s former military dictatorship in the 1970s and ‘80s, yet remain stubbornly silent about the horrors their fellow Koreans endure for no reason other than to have been unlucky enough to have been born north of the 38th parallel. U.S. president Donald Trump, meanwhile, has never claimed to make the promotion of human rights paramount to his foreign policy agenda. And as Joshua Stanton over at One Free Korea points out, too many U.S. leaders have fallen into the trap of equating the North Korean people with their regime—see, for example, Sen. Lindsey Graham’s disgusting glibness at the prospect of millions of Koreans dead. Mike Pompeo, the CIA director, put it much better when he suggested the “separation” of the people from their regime, which is to say, the toppling of the Korean dynasty. Here’s the thing: If the North Korean regime actually enjoyed widespread public support, the gulag, the secret police, and the repatriation regime would not actually be necessary. The human rights situation is the biggest tell that the regime and its people are not one and the same.
But of course the most significant impediment to movement on human rights is North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. When a country is threatening the literal annihilation of its neighbors—well, let’s just say that one’s mind tends to become concentrated.
The upshot? Respected figures like David Ignatius of the Washington Post propose that the United States negotiate a formal piece accord with the North Korean government— one that would provide a guarantee of the continuation of the North Korean regime. In other words, the gulag would be here to stay. Alas, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said much the same, cooing to Pyongyang that the United States does not seek regime change. Human rights have fallen entirely by the wayside.
This is a major victory for the North Korean regime, and a tragedy for its people. Contrary to public opinion, the regime actually does care about its global public image. See, for example, its routine denials each time the United Nations releases another report about its human rights situation. And North Korea’s tourism industry not only generates needed foreign currency for the regime: It also churns out thousands of useful idiots each year, who spread cheerful stories about the country to their friends and online.
In other words, North Korea’s nuclearization worked. What a horrifying story in itself—and a what a disturbing lesson for human rights-abusing, rogue regimes everywhere.
