Toxic Indifference to North Korea

Since 2002, defectors among the flood of refugees from North Korea have detailed firsthand accounts of systematic starvation, torture and murder. Enemies of the state are used in experiments to develop new generations of chemical and biological weapons that threaten the world. A microcosm of these horrors is Camp 22, one of 12 concentration camps housing an estimated 200,000 political prisoners facing torture or execution for such "crimes" as being a Christian or a relative of someone suspected of deviation from "official ideology of the state." Another eyewitness, Kwon Hyuk, formerly chief manager at Camp 22, repeated to me what he asserted to the BBC: "I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. . . . The parents were vomiting and dying, but until the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing."

So why no worldwide outrage?

For now it appears that realpolitik trumps distant horrors. Despite heroic efforts by Christian activists on both sides of the Pacific to sound the alarm, the South Korean government views these accusations as unwelcome complications to its problematic and complex relations with the North. Indeed, a foreign ministry official whom I met did not deny that North Korea gassed political prisoners to further its program to develop weapons of mass destruction. He politely stated that Seoul was focusing exclusively on the threat from Pyongyang's nuclear program in the context of the six-nation peace talks. Meanwhile, most South Korean nongovernmental organizations are so committed to the idyllic vision of a reunified Korean Peninsula that they have turned a deaf ear to the horrors inflicted on their own people north of the 38th parallel.

The Western media haven't exactly ignored this story. Instead, they have generally treated it in an offhand manner chillingly reminiscent of how the Holocaust was reported during World War II. For example, the Pentagon just recently sought emergency authority to resume administering the anthrax vaccine to U.S. troops stationed on the Korean Peninsula as well as in the Persian Gulf because of "a significant potential for a military emergency involving a heightened risk to United States military forces of attack." The limited coverage of the story focused not on the threat posed by North Korean chemical and biological weaponry but on the controversy over the safety of inoculating the troops.

North Korea's Mengele-style experimentation with killer agents such as anthrax has not escalated into a mass-murder campaign against the regime's own population, the Allied troops stationed in the Korean DMV or North Korea's neighbors -- not yet. But beyond the nuclear threat, the world has reason to be deeply concerned over how much of this deadly know-how has been transferred to terrorist states or entities.

It isn't necessary to insist on "regime change" as a precondition of dialogue. But the world community -- with the United States, Japan, China and Russia in the lead -- must insist on behavioral change, ameliorating the North's human rights pathologies, before making diplomatic concessions. We should start by identifying -- by name -- those involved in crimes against humanity against their own people, and warning these criminals that eventually they will be held accountable before the bar of justice.

The problem with the strategy prescribed by the author is that China and Russia are badly in need of regime change themselves; they're simply the lesser of the competing evils at this particular moment. Both were involved in mass murder and the utilization of gulags and concentration camps by both countries is well documents (though understudied by those who think that socialism and communism is humane and a model for all countries to follow).

For starters, there should be no concessions whatsoever. North Korea will implode from within unless the US and others keep the inevitable from happening. North Korea cannot feed itself, nor can it do much of anything other than hold the world hostage to its claims of possessing nuclear weapons (and the attendant selling of said weapons on the black or open market). Further isolating the country may actually hasten the demise of the old regime and bring about greater change than engagement.