North Korean Human Rights & U.S. National Security
By Jay Lefkowitz
U.S. Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea
American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC
January 17, 2008
Thank you Nick for that introduction. I’m pleased to be back here at
the American Enterprise Institute. I would like to thank AEI for
holding this conference, and for its ongoing commitment to freedom for
people around the world, including, of course, North Koreans.
RECENT EVENTS
Quite a lot has happened in regard to North Korea since I last spoke
at AEI nearly two years ago. That was not long after a joint statement
had been issued six-party talks in September 2005, in which North Korea
promised anew to abandon its nuclear weapons and rejoin the nuclear Non
Proliferation Treaty. Talks had begun two years earlier after it became
clear that North Korea had not ended its nuclear program as required
under the 1994 Agreed Framework. Not long after the speech, I was
making plans to visit the Kaesong Industrial Complex inside North Korea
to assess human rights conditions, when the regime tested ballistic
missiles on July 4, 2006.
I was again considering a trip when the regime
conducted a nuclear test that October. Economists teach us that
correlation does not prove causality, but I have remained wary of
announcing future travel to North Korea for fear of what might happen
next!
About this time last year, the North Korean regime and
the other five negotiating parties reached the February 13 agreement,
under which North Korea promised the abandonment of one of its known
nuclear facilities and the full disclosure of all nuclear activities in
return for economic and energy assistance and other inducements,
including the normalization of relations. An initial requirement that
North Korea "discuss" all its nuclear activities within 60 days of the
agreement was not met, and it has since missed a December 31 deadline
to disclose fully its activities. Recently, the regime said it will
strengthen its "war deterrent."
This is rather unfortunate as it signals that North
Korea is not serious about disarming in a timely manner. It is a
regrettable development for our security, but it is also bad for North
Korea. It is unlikely the regime will get from the international
community a better deal than the current one.
In other recent developments, the Congressional
Research Service noted in a study last month that there are "reports
from reputable sources that North Korea has provided arms and possibly
training to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka… two
of the most active terrorist groups…" This comes on the heels of
widespread reports that North Korea may have been engaging in nuclear
proliferation to Syria, which likely prompted the preemptive air strike
by Israel four months ago.
Taken together, these developments should remind us
that North Korea remains one of the hardest foreign policy problems for
the U.S. to solve. Its conduct does not appear to be that of a
government that is willing to come in from the cold. Moreover, it is
increasingly clear that North Korea will remain in its present nuclear
status when the Administration leaves office in one year.
POLICY GOALS & RATIONALE
Given this reality, it useful to step back and revisit our
objectives in regard to North Korea. We have now been engaged in
six-party talks for more than four years and it makes sense to take
stock and declare our objectives and rationale.
First and foremost, our primary concern with North
Korea must be security the security of the U.S. and our allies. As our
National Security Strategy says, "Defending our Nation against its
enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the Federal
Government." It is for this reason that attention to North Korea
usually centers on its nuclear program. North Korea’s possession of
such weapons unilaterally threatens the security of a strategically
important region that includes China, Japan and South Korea—our second,
fourth and seventh-largest trading partners respectively. North Korea’s
long history of proliferating weapons systems and technology is also a
major threat to U.S. interests. This history has become much more
troubling since this serial proliferator has become nuclear armed. The
regime is not suicidal, but it is erratic and refuses to be bound by
the norms of the international community. For this reason, simple
deterrence may not be sufficient. There is no guarantee that our own
military and nuclear strength alone can prevent the regime from
proliferating nuclear weapons or technology to Islamists or their
backers.
We also have other deep concerns about the conduct of
the North Korean regime. Among these are its counterfeiting of U.S.
currency and pharmaceuticals, its drug trafficking and money
laundering, and of course, it human rights abuses, which are infamous.
The way the North Korean government treats its own
people is inhumane and therefore deeply offensive to us. It should also
offend free people around the world. Clearly we want to see an
improvement in this, just as we want to see an abatement of the threats
to our security created by the regime. But are the two unrelated?
Certainly, many view the issues as separate. The six-party talks have
not involved human rights. However, there is a valid question of
whether this continues to make sense. After all, we know from history
that improving human rights is not only a worthy end in itself, but it
can also be a means to other ends, such as peace and security.
Democratic societies, for example, do not attack each other.
But with a government such as North Korea’s, an
inherently fragile regime desperately clinging to power, the same
forces that drive it to mistreat its own people also explain its
threatening conduct toward its neighbors. Often, we find that
repressive regimes create enemies abroad to justify their authoritarian
rule at home. Certainly North Korea does this. If you look at the
Korean Central News Agency, its propaganda organ, seldom does a week go
by in which it does not allege plotting by forces in the U.S., Japan or
South Korea to invade the country and place it under imperial rule.
Citizens are warned that they should be ever-watchful. Under such
conditions, which the regime’s leaders know to be a fiction, extreme
security measures are apparently justified at home. And so the state is
"justified" in redoubling its defenses against foreign enemies, or so
it declares.
The North Korean regime’s paranoia prevents it from allowing a
liberalization of its statist economy, because it fears any
liberalization that would make people less dependent on the government
would contribute to its demise. Left destitute by this choice, North
Korea must rely on foreign aid to survive and feed its people. But its
paranoia about empowering its people at all prohibits its from
accepting any of the monitoring and reform requirements that
occasionally come with foreign aid. So instead, the regime extorts the
aid granted by others. This is a major reason why it has pursued a
nuclear program, why it stations thousands of artillery systems in
reach of Seoul, and why it occasionally acts out well-planned and
public diplomatic and military tantrums.
These are often intended to frighten the international
community into giving patronage. Dictatorial regimes almost always
threaten other nations, when they perceive it as necessary to their
survival. What this shows is that security issues and human rights
issues are linked inextricably. They both derive from the nature of the
regime, and any long-term effort by the international community to
alleviate security concerns in northeast Asia will have to seek to
modify the nature of the regime.
Any government that treats its people with so little regard will
inevitably challenge regional security, even if it did not have a
nuclear weapons program. This is demonstrated clearly by North Korea’s
non-nuclear affronts, like proliferating conventional weapons,
narco-trafficking, counterfeiting U.S. currency and human trafficking.
And, of course, how can one ever know with a regime as erratic as
Pyonyang’s that it will not actually use its nuclear weapons or sell
them to a terrorist bidder?
ASSESSING IMPEDIMENTS & ASSUMPTIONS
Having revisited what we want from our policy on North
Korea—improved security and human rights—it also makes sense to assess
what the impediments to progress have been. And after four years of
six-party talks, it makes sense to review the assumptions upon which
previous policy was built and make sure they are still valid today.
One key assumption that turned out to be incorrect was
that China and South Korea would apply significant pressure to North
Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons. Instead, they seem to prefer the
status quo to unknown change.
Our original assumption was not irrational when it was
made. A multilateral approach was viewed as essential, especially since
the two nations that border North Korea—China and South Korea—are the
two nations with the most leverage over the Pyongyang regime. Certainly
they provide it with the lion’s share of its foreign assistance,
including food and fuel. They are also North Korea’s largest trading
partners. But it was further assumed that both countries shared our
strong desire that North Korea not be permitted to possess a nuclear
program and arsenal. This may have been a misguided assumption.
China probably would prefer that North Korea not have
nuclear weapons, but not at the expense of its other national
interests. It has not seriously pushed North Korea to abandon its
weapons program and its assistance programs and trade with North Korea
have persisted with only brief interruptions. The reasons are that
Beijing believes North Korea is unlikely to use nuclear weapons against
China; that North Korea’s proliferation does not affect China directly;
and most importantly—that Beijing does not want a precipitous collapse
of the North Korean government, which could cause a refugee influx and
instability in its border region. We may not like these views, but they
are understandable. Therefore, China has not played the role we had
hoped in denuclearizing North Korea, even though it clearly relishes
hosting the six-party talks.
Our assumption regarding South Korea’s interests may
have been equally faulty. South Korea has not applied serious pressure
on North Korea, and appears to share China’s preference for the status
quo over a process of change it may not be able to control. For the
last decade, the South Korean government has been very hesitant to
criticize North Korean human rights violations. Last fall, Seoul could
not even bring itself to vote in favor a UN resolution in the human
rights committee that expressed concern about abuses by the regime in
Pyongyang.
Moreover, South Korea has provided Pyongyang with
copious amount of assistance, like rice and fertilizer, even though
this is often diverted from those in need to the regime elite and
military. The South Korean government is also believed to have made
sizable cash payments to North Korea at times, and has engaged in joint
industrial projects that it believes will open the regime. All of this
provides considerable support to Pyongyang. We sincerely hope the new
South Korean government will drive a harder bargain with Pyongyang and
speak more forthrightly about North Korean human rights abuses. But
again, without a change in the ROK’s policies, we cannot expect too
much support from them.
Because the Chinese and South Korean governments have been unwilling
to apply significant pressure on Pyongyang, recent talks have, in
actuality, become a bilateral negotiation between the U.S. and North
Korea. What we had hoped would be a process in which Beijing and Seoul
would simultaneously withhold carrots and use their considerable
influence over Pyongyang to end its nuclear activities has evolved into
a process that provides new carrots without a corresponding cost to
Pyongyang.
OPTIONS AND NEXT STEPS
This brings us to next steps and revised policy options. In my view,
a realigned approach should take into account three factors:
1. We should now shift our focus from a short to a
longer time frame. It is increasingly likely that North Korea will have
the same nuclear status one year from now that it has today.
2. Policy should rest on assumptions that correlate
with recent facts and events. It is evident that South Korea and China
will not exert significant pressure on North Korea if they think it
might lead to its collapse.
3. All negotiations with North Korea should firmly link human rights, economic support, and security issues.
In other words, we should consider a new approach to North Korea --
one of "constructive engagement" intended to open up the regime.
Offering a new concept of dialogue and taking historically effective
steps to interact, perhaps even bilaterally, with North Korea, would
constitute an ambitious but potentially feasible diplomatic initiative.
This would involve declaring that a candid and ongoing human rights
dialogue with Pyongyang is now a permanent part of our engagement
policy and a condition for normalizing relations. In this way, talks
could evolve to resemble the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (OSCE), which came out of the Helsinki Final Act and its
"Helsinki process." This was the mechanism by which the West and the
Eastern Bloc engaged in dialogue on political-military, economic, and
human rights issues beginning in the 1970s.
A way forward on this would be to link issues of
importance to us and convey to the North Korean regime that this is
permanently on the new agenda. The working group on normalization of
relations would be a good starting point for a discussion on human
rights. But linkage is needed to make this useful. Working groups that
are irrelevant to the overall process are just that—irrelevant. In
Helsinki, real progress in all three baskets was necessary for the
overall negotiation to advance. On human rights, progress is not
bureaucrats from two governments meeting and reading prepared
statements from binders. Progress is something tangible and
demonstrated that moves North Korea closer to the norms of the
international community.
With this structure, the discussion on nuclear
disarmament would continue to be the primary objective, but the
incorporation of, and linkage with, human rights in the dialogue, would
serve the purpose of encouraging cooperation from the North Korean
regime. The key is to make the link between human rights and other
issues explicit and non-severable, so that it cannot be discarded in
any future rush to ‘get to yes’ in an agreement. That is because an
agreement without human rights progress will not foster regional
security over the long term.
North Korea is unlikely to prefer this approach. But it
is one that could ultimately serve the interests of all the parties.
Economic assistance to North Korea may therefore be a possibility, but
it must be given only in return for tangible, verifiable progress on
all issues that are a component of the dialogue. This is how it worked
with Helsinki. We can also consider using other leverage that we know
to be effective on Pyongyang. This might include restricting the
regime’s access to the U.S. and international banking system—which has
at times been necessary before, given the regime’s involvement in money
laundering.
Constructive engagement can also include expanded
foreign assistance, including humanitarian aid, to North Korea—provided
it reaches those for whom it is intended. This is one area where the UN
could play a constructive role. If aid donors could be syndicated and
would agree to offer large amounts of humanitarian assistance to North
Korea contingent on full access and monitoring, Pyongyang might feel
pressured and impelled to accept, especially if Beijing and Seoul
stopped writing checks with no conditions attached. In this way, the
misery of the North Korean people could be partially alleviated.
Our engagement also should include subsidiary dialogues
and exchanges. When U.S.-Soviet relations evolved after the death of
Stalin, we signed a cultural agreement that eventually enabled tens of
thousands of Americans and Soviets to visit each others’ nations. By so
doing, it exposed millions more to cultural exhibitions hosted by each
country. It was a way of reaching behind the Iron Curtain to the Soviet
people. The same could be done with North Korea.
Finally, and regardless of the state of our dialogue,
we should continue with activities that have proven to be effective in
opening up closed societies over time. The real changes in North Korea
will likely come from within. We should certainly focus our policy on
facilitating such changes. When I spoke here two years ago, I was asked
about my principle objectives and I said that "a key way to empower the
North Korean people is to force a ray of light through the veil that
Kim Jong Il has drawn over North Korea." Since that time, the American
taxpayer has provided more resources for the various organizations that
broadcast news and information into North Korea by radio, and I have
asked that the resources we commit to this be significantly increased.
We have also talked to other governments about supporting this effort,
and we have asked Japan to permit medium wave broadcasts from its
territory for this important purpose—which is also a way of reaching
Japanese abductees still living in North Korea.
* * *
Much has been learned in the past four years since we
entered the current phase of dialogue with North Korea. North Korea has
not kept its word. Indeed, proliferation concerns cast a pall over
global security, thanks to Pyongyang. It is appropriate now to
reevaluate – to look at what has worked and what has not. We now know
what levers work on the North Korean government. We should use them.
The best solution may be an evolved dialogue—one that takes a holistic
view of the challenges presented by North Korea. This, combined with a
strong deterrent capability, missile defenses and effective
counter-proliferation tools could form an adjusted and whole policy,
reflective of recent developments.