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We have a strong interest in moral as well as practical debate about North Korea. The country generates ethical dilemmas of the first order, and we now have a growing body of international humanitarian law that can be used as a guide to think about the regime’s abuses; as we noted in an earlier post, David Hawk has made some particularly interesting contributions in this regard.
We thus feel obligated to relay a recent contribution by Robert Park, even though we have some qualms about it. Park raises the question of whether the Kim Jong Il regime is guilty of genocide.
The story of Robert Park is well-known among North Korea activists. On Christmas Eve 2009, Park crossed into North Korea to draw attention to the persecution of Christians. Park was arrested, imprisoned and abused in North Korea before being released. Both Park and Aijalon Mahli Gomes, who crossed into North Korea shortly after Park in order to bring attention to his detention, attended Every Nation Church of Korea in Seoul, an evangelical congregation with a strong interest in the North. Christianity Today has a useful archive of stories on the two activists.
The Genocide Convention stands as a landmark document in the evolution of international humanitarian law, and was carefully crafted by Raphael Lemkin, its tireless champion, to refer to a narrow and particularly horrific set of crimes. Article 2--which Park quotes in full in his piece--defines genocide as: “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
The scope of genocide is thus bounded by the “intention to destroy” the group, but is qualified by “in whole or in part,” which opens the door to extreme forms of persecution that involve systematic killing of the targeted group. We have doubts that some of what Park describes rises to that standard. In particular, there is a distinction to be drawn between religious persecution and genocide and between the horrors of the prison camp system and genocide (even if both might qualify as “crimes against humanity”). But some actions such as the infanticide of Chinese-Korean children seem to conform pretty damn closely to the crimes of the convention.
You be the judge, but one last reference first. The Genocide Prevention Task Force, convened under the auspices of the United States Institute of Peace, has given serious thought to early-warning and intervention issues.
Please read the article below or find the full version from the Harvard International Review here.
North Korea and the Genocide Convention
By Robert Park
"Factionalists or enemies of class, whoever they are; their seed must be? eliminated through three generations." Kim Il-sung (1972)
While it is certain that North Korea has committed a political and ideological genocide which has claimed millions of innocent lives, it is often overlooked that the North Korean regime has also in every aspect violated the UN Genocide Convention, to which it is a state party.
Article 2 of the 1948 Convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Genocide on national, ethnical and racial grounds
Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have fled to China to survive. The majority are women, 80% of whom are sex-trafficked or sold into forced marriages. Yet even if the North Korean woman is married to a Chinese national the Chinese authorities will still repatriate every North Korean refugee they can find per a 1986 agreement with the DPRK, in contravention of its obligations under the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol.
The DPRK continues to systematically and brutally exterminate every child believed to be fathered by non-North Koreans (usually Chinese or Chinese-Koreans) through infanticide and forced abortions. According to the U.S. State Department, "The reason given for this policy was to prevent the birth of half-Chinese children." Thousands of babies have been killed on national, ethnical, and/or racial grounds; not one has been spared. This unwavering policy of elimination corresponds with the regime's obsession with racial purity, and the intent to destroy half-Chinese babies is clear and incontestable.
Ethnic infanticide and forced abortions qualify as two of the acts which?constitute genocide: killing members of a group and attempting to prevent group?births.
Genocide on religious grounds
Before the division of Korea, the north was considered to be the center of Christianity in East Asia with millions of believers; 25-30% of the population in Pyongyang was Christian. Today, North Korea is internationally recognized as the worst violator of religious freedom in the world and true religious belief is not tolerated. Christians are either publicly executed or forcibly transferred to concentration camps where they are systematically starved, tortured and worked to death along with their entire families to three generations, including non-religious relatives and children. The cruelty and barbarity occurring in these camps has no parallel in the world today. In 2002, the National Association of Evangelicals stated that North Korea is "more brutal, more deliberate, more implacable, and more purely genocidal" than any other nation in the world.
Every method which constitutes genocide as outlined in the Convention is being utilized by the regime to destroy its indigenous religious population through the widespread practice of public executions, systematic use of torture, deliberate deprivation of food and medicine in concentration camps, persecution of the children of religious believers, and the forcible transfer and imprisonment of children.
Inhumanity which has no precedent
In May of this year, Amnesty International released a report and satellite images which indicate that the "mass political prison camps" in North Korea have grown dramatically over the last ten years. Most of the prisoners are held in areas known as "Total Control Zones" from which they will never be permitted to come out. 100% of the prisoners in these areas are being exterminated for perceived political offenses; in other words they have committed no crime whatsoever.
Ahn Myong Chol is a former guard and one of the first witnesses to focus international attention on the mass atrocities taking place in the camps. He told MSNBC in 2003, "They trained me not to treat the prisoners as human beings.
If someone is against socialism, if someone tries to escape from prison, then kill him. If there's a record of killing any escapee, then the guard will be entitled to study in the college... Beating and killing is an everyday affair."
Kwon Hyok is the former head of security at North Korea's Prison Camp 22. He was the first to disclose to the world about the extensive use of gas chambers and the conducting of medical experiments on prisoners, including children in the "Total Control Zone". Hyok told BBC in 2004, "It would be a total lie to say I felt sympathy for the children dying such a painful death... In the society and the regime I was under, I just felt they were enemies; so I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all."
About one-third of the over 200,000 innocent human beings in North Korea's camps today are children condemned as guilty-by-association according to Kim Il-sung's 1972 proclamation.
In reference to the atrocities being committed against North Korean children, N.C. Heiken, director of the film "Kimjongilia", who is of Jewish background, said to the Daily NK in June, "The most shocking thing is that there is such a thing as a totally closed prison camp, and that a child could be born in this camp with no hope to ever leave it. Essentially, that child is being raised as a slave or an animal, and I think that is the most debased thing I have ever heard of in the history of humanity."
The international response
During talks in July between the U.S. and the DPRK as expected, there was no allusion to the "issue" of arbitrary killings, mass starvation, the enslavement of children, or heinous and systematic torture taking place every day in North Korea's prison camps. Likewise the six-party talks since its inception in 2003 has not included even the mere mention of the term "human rights" in any one of its sporadic meetings, while innumerable North Koreans have been exterminated in absolute silence.
Yet this is much more than a human rights issue. This is genocide.
