It’s been two weeks since the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea delivered its unprecedented and scathing 400-word document on crimes against humanity, detailing murder, extermination and multiple abuses including torture, rape and forced abortion in North Korea’s infamous labour camps.
The UN panel’s report also includes a recommendation to the UN Security Council to refer the case to the International Criminal Court. It is unusual for the UN to directly implicate a country’s leader, but panel chairman Michael Kirby wrote to Kim Jong-un in January adding that this mission was to find “accountable all those, including possibly yourself, who may be responsible for crimes against humanity”.
Harrowing stories from survivors of North Korea’s infamous gulags were also contained in the report, and released to the media in mid February. One tragedy told how an angry prison guard forced the mother of a crying baby to drown her child “face down in a bucket of water”.
Since the report came out, there has been mounting pressure on the international community to act urgently to prevent any further atrocities in North Korea. Yet almost immediately, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying dismissed the findings as “unreasonable criticism”. North Korea, too, ignored the significance of the report, expressing its belief that the human rights findings were just a cover for regime change in Pyongyang.
The South Korean government, meanwhile, finds itself in a far more delicate situation. An opinion piece in the Korea Times claims it “would make no sense to turn a blind eye to North Koreans’ miserable human rights situation. The rival parties need to cooperate to pass a North Korea human rights law during the ongoing parliamentary session.”
Meanwhile, an editorial in the Korea Herald says Kim Jong-un must “pay heed to the UN report” before lamenting the decades-long lack of response. “What is laid bare by the report may not shock many of us in South Korea, who know better than most about how horrible the situation in the totalitarian state has been.
“Yet it is sad to read the report, which even compares what has been taking place in the northern part of the peninsula with atrocities committed by the Nazis. It is shameful that we have done little for our brethren suffering from such hardships.”
While Seoul will be pleased that attention to human rights violations has shifted to a global stage, Park Geun-hye will be wary of upsetting inter-Korean relations, which are said to be improving.
Prior to the report’s release, the two Koreas held high-level talks at the border village of Panmunjeom for the first time in seven years. More talks are expected in the future but real progress has finally been made in reuniting Korean families separated since the end of the Korean War.
In extraordinary scenes at the Geumgangsan Hotel in North Korea recently, a group of 82 South Koreans met their relatives from north of the border. At one table, 90-year-old Kim Young-hwan, who fled south in 1953, met his former wife and now 65-year-old son. According to several media outlets, Kim was “unable to express his sorrow, repeatedly telling them, ‘I’m sorry’.”
Elsewhere, many brothers, sisters, aunties and uncles wailed uncontrollably at the banquet dinner hosted by North Korean authorities. The three-day event was initially scheduled for last September was but cancelled by Pyongyang at the last minute.
Despite scepticism in the Korean media, these events are surely a sign of development in the region. In the meantime, Seoul needs to press the north on its terrible human rights record. A difficult balancing act awaits.
Andrew Farrell works as an English language teacher in Korea.
