The most successful human rights engagement with China—such as that of John Kamm, a former head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong who has intervened on behalf of hundreds of political prisoners—is characterized by what one might call respectful tenaciousness. Trying to crack Chinese Internet censorship or highlighting the cases of those mistreated for seeking to advance the rule of law or exercise free speech, for instance, is always appropriate. But so is applauding China's attempts to control corruption or experiment with local elections.
Effective human rights work requires two things. First, it requires a tragic sense of history—a recognition that, no matter what we do, we will never be able to save everyone from misery or suffering. Sometimes, for example, despite its immense power and resources, the U. S. government's own ability to influence human rights is limited, and its willingness to do so in a bold way is compromised by competing interests. We who care about human rights would do well to recognize that and shape our recommendations to the U.S. government accordingly. Otherwise, we risk even greater marginalization than we already experience.
But secondly, good human rights work requires persistence and a long view, the recognition that human rights have become the lingua franca for much of the world and a ticket of admission to widely honored membership in the international community. The United States with its plummeting approval ratings around the globe has learned that the hard way. China too will learn eventually that the best way to avert hurt feelings is to avoid prompting criticism in the first place.
I'm almost certain none will like this suggestion.
Rumors are spreading among North Korean defectors that the 22 have all been executed. The security agency in South Hwanghae Province reportedly put them in front of a firing squad. If this is true, our government has sent the 22 North Koreans to their death. Before these suspicions grow further, South Korean authorities must reveal what exactly the 22 North Koreans said during questioning and discover whether they are alive or dead.
Putative GOP presidential candidate, Senator John McCain recently singled out DPRK as "…the most horrible regime probably on earth." But then, Jack goes too far, when he says, "That is one of the major things left out of the negotiating table throughout the six-party talks…" Yet, US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill does talk, or will talk, about human rights.
Well, people who are well informed on this issue understand that as we get through this declaration, we will then go to something called the Third Phase. Now what we would like in the Third Phase is for North Korea to not only dismantle all of their programs, but also to give up, to abandon, pursuant to the September 2005 agreement, to abandon their separated plutonium, and any other fissile material they have. Now, in order to get that, we're going to put a few things on the table. And one of them is normalization with the United States, a bilateral normalization process. As part of normalization, we will of course be discussing human rights, and we have been discussing human rights. And I don't think we should ever be afraid to discuss human rights.
Human rights needs to be understood by the North Koreans as really the price of admission to the international community. So as we discuss our normalization, of course this subject will be discussed. But what we would like the North Koreans to come to understand is that human rights is something that they don't have a choice on, that if they want to join the international community, they have to start living up to some human rights standards. This is not just some desiderata on the part of the United States. This has to do with international obligations. And so, to the extent that we can convey this, of course we'll convey it through this bilateral process of leading to normalization.
Jamestown Foundation calls it a "new starting point" for PRC and ROK, with diplomats shuttling already between PRC President Hu Jintao, ROK President-elect Lee Myung-bak, and Kim Jong-il. Scott Snyder lays out future bilateral relations as a contest between Seoul's efforts to keep business and trade in proportion and Beijing's efforts to "cast its shadow" over the Lee administration's relations with DPRK and Japan. But, Lee appears determined to privilege security relations with Washington and Tokyo at the expense of Beijing.
Lee's willingness to speak publicly about North Korean human rights shortcomings suggests that Lee is less likely to go out of his way to avoid offending North Korea's leaders—and for that matter raise themes that his Chinese counterpart may not find helpful. For instance, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman was pressed to respond to Lee's comments on North Korean human rights in a press conference the day after Lee Myung-bak's election. Another sensitive factor that may influence the pace and direction of developments in inter-Korean relations is that Lee's Grand National Party has never participated in inter-Korean dialogue activities organized by previous South Korean governments and was even excluded from some «non-governmental» exchanges by the North, so the official inter-Korean relationship itself will be under new management. These factors suggest the possibility that a downturn in inter-Korean relations might sidetrack progress in implementing the Six-Party Agreements, resulting in renewed tensions and renewed pressure on China to exert pressure on North Korea. Based on these concerns, China has pursued an intensive dialogue in an apparent effort to keep the new South Korean president from making a rapid shift away from the current track of engagement efforts with North Korea.
Secondly, Lee Myung-bak has clearly indicated that his top priority in foreign policy is to improve strategic relations with the United States, while efforts to improve Sino-South Korean relations will focus primarily on upgrading economic cooperation. Although Chinese Party School specialist Zhang Liangui argues that «the development of economic ties is bound to bring closer Sino-ROK political, cultural, and even military exchanges and cooperation,» Lee's top priority remains the reinvigoration of U.S.-ROK security ties (Shanghai Dongfang Zaobao, December 20, 2007).
Third, Lee Myung-bak's visible efforts to improve relations with Japan have caught Chinese attention, especially since an improved South Korea-Japan relationship may lead to strengthened trilateral coordination among the United States, Japan and South Korea (South China Morning Post, January 30). Although this sort of coordination was promoted in the late 1990s as a response to ongoing concerns about North Korea, the resurgence of bilateral textbook, territorial, and historical and political disputes between South Korea and Japan made continuation of such trilateral coordination both unstable and perhaps unsustainable. Now that the Beijing-led Six-Party Talks have been established, Chinese analysts may consider renewed U.S.-Japan-ROK trilateral coordination efforts as incompatible with those talks since it may be perceived by North Korea as threatening. Such security coordination also invites concerns in China that it might be used to encircle China or to strengthen coordination in response to any potential cross-Strait crisis. Chinese scholars have unofficially discouraged South Korean counterparts from renewing such coordination even though a purely North Korea-focused precedent exists from the late 1990s. South Korea's outgoing Foreign Minister Song Min-soon has also warned that re-establishment of trilateral policy coordination might have unanticipated negative effects.
South Korea returned a group of North Koreans to the communist nation after they strayed into southern waters on fishing boats earlier this month, the Defense Ministry said Saturday.
The 22 people drifted into the South off the divided peninsula's west coast in two motorless boats Feb. 8 and were repatriated later in the day because they wanted to go home, the ministry said in a statement, released amid media speculation the North Koreans attempted to defect.
The Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported the weather on Feb. 8 was not bad enough for the boats to stray, suggesting the group intended to defect to the South and were returned against their wishes.
The report also noted the government did not make any public statements about the incident at the time, even though it normally does so.
Obviously, I'm elated about the prospects of improved trilateral relations between Japan, ROK, and US, especially since Six-Party negotiations offer scant hope for improvement in this year.
Later on, Goldberg brings up a simple point, that national interest conflicts with human rights, and all the big boys let human rights fall by the wayside.
On this occasion, the confrontation was sparked not by protests, but by some do-it-yourself work. Monks in the Drepung monastery were whitewashing and painting auspicious symbols on the walls of one of its buildings, assigned as a ceremonial residence for the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, who has been in exile since fleeing Chinese repression of an uprising in 1959. The painting celebrated his latest trophy: a Congressional Gold Medal from the United Statesâ€â€its highest civilian honour.
The police wanted to stop the painting. The monastery was then sealed off and surrounded by armed police. The reports tell of a similar showdown at another Lhasa monastery, Nechung, and of various other attempts by Tibetans to celebrate the congressional honour. It is impossible to confirm their accuracy. For all the relative openness of China these days, much of what goes on in Tibet remains hidden from the outside world. New rules introduced at the beginning of the year to make it easier for foreign reporters to travel and report in China excluded Tibet.
The reports are entirely plausible, however. Tibetans revere the Dalai Lama, both as a spiritual leader and as a symbol of a national identity that is not â€ūChineseâ€?.
As with most long-running disputes, the facts that underpin the Tibetan question are full of nuance and subject to competing interpretations. That no major party to this situation has been particularly generous in acknowledging this has only reinforced the overall air of intractability.
China's rulers, accustomed to controlling the flow of information and ideas, and hence how history is taught, skim over - or edit out - parts of Tibet's past that are inconvenient to their narrative.
Tibet's formation as a recognizable nation began as far back as the fourth century. In the early seventh century, Tibetans, under Songtsen Gampo, converted to Buddhism and adopted a written language based on the Ranjana script - both imported from India, it is worth noting.
Tibetans came to control much of their region, including parts of Nepal, Burma, India and present-day Xinjiang (China), and they did it the old-fashioned way, through warfare. They pointedly refused to defer to Tang Dynasty emperors, and in the late eighth century even briefly captured Changan, the Chinese capital, leading to the negotiation of borders between the two states.
Effective Chinese control over Tibet didn't come until the late 18th century and even then was mostly supervisory. Early in the last century, even that began to fall apart, as did China's hold on other parts of its periphery.
To enhance their position in India, the British worked intermittently to reinforce the de facto Tibetan state, which China wiped out in 1950 amid since-flouted promises of «broad autonomy,» and an understanding of this leads to the second important acknowledgement.
Chinese insecurity is driven, and understandably so, by the involvement of Western powers on its periphery. Even as the People's Liberation Army marched into Tibet, Chinese troops were girding to repulse the United States from the Korean peninsula.
Where President Truman saw Communism on the march, China's eyes were fixed on another prize: ending a so-called century of humiliation, which required establishing buffers of its own. The Dalai Lama's popularity in the West arouses Chinese suspicions for much the same reason.
The third unpleasant fact is the ugly record of feudal rule by Tibetan lamas, which China naturally enjoys highlighting.
«Do you know how cruel the lamaism was?» asked Lu Xiuzhang, Tibet's former deputy chief of propaganda. «People were dismembered to be served up in ceremonies, and ordinary people were slaves.» The characterization may not be the fairest, but the man has a point.
Under Communist rule, though, this country committed widespread abominations of its own in Tibet, killing monks, destroying temples and causing famine, yet the only account you can get is of the march of progress as investment pours in.
«Even though the Dalai Lama has agreed to give up the request for Tibet's independence, there's been no breakthrough,» said Wang Lixiong, a Chinese author whose writing about the country's western regions have caused his arrest. «China really doesn't have any intention to solve this issue.»
Wang, like many others, believes China is content to play a game that involves meeting with delegations of exiled Tibetans when the demands of public relations require it, while patiently awaiting the Dalai Lama's death.
That might sound like playing a strong hand smartly, but is it really?
After all, well before the Chinese in Tibet, European colonists and South African whites asked: Why would black Africans prefer independence with poverty to association with deep-pocketed outside powers?
The answer is that self-respect and cultural integrity have no price.
On the surface, Tibet is like Taiwan and Hong Kong, both regions Beijing claims for its own, but which should be independent. Yet, Lamaism is no way to improve Tibet. What Beijing needs to know is, that it doesn't need to grab all the territory around its periphery. Histrionics over the Dalai Lama will not reassure Beijing, but only hardens centralizing tendencies.
Two major events concerning the Korean peninsula hit the public in the last few days, the Second DPRK-ROK Summit and the latest installment of the Six Party talks in Beijing. As usual the ball is in Pyongyang's end of the court, and even I won't place bets, at least not on one prediction.
In Pyongyang, not even ROK President Roh Moo-hyun can get respect (and, who's really complaining?). During the course of the media bomb, I was concerned about the inordinate attention on economic issues. Seeing Chung Mong-koo in Pyongyang on South Korean TV made me wonder if the entire reason the ROK Supreme Court exonerated him was, so he could grab his share of loot from the North Koreans.
Among the top three business topics expected for discussion - natural resource developments, roadway and railway distribution system expansions and dockyard construction - Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group is said to be interested in building railroad cars through its shipping affiliate Glovis, and also measure the feasibility of SOC businesses, while POSCO showed interest in forestation.
Although company officials said forestation is just a possibility, as the steel maker has shown its interest in securing carbon credit overseas, industry insiders say the opportunity will be advantageous for POSCO if cooperation comes through.
And as speculations rose that SK Group may be considering communication and energy projects in the North, company officials said plans are open for review if the right offer is made.
LG and Samsung, which are said to be mulling over their specialty areas of electronics, seem to be in the same scouting stages as others.
From what can be gleaned of their substance, talks between the two leaders on October 3rd only emphasised the distance still to travel. Mr Kim may be willing to squeeze the outside world for aid?but on his terms. So Mr Roh?s offer of what amounted to a Marshall Plan to transform North Korea?s economy in pursuit of Chinese-style liberalisation met with blank dismissal. Mr Kim does not even like a showcase industrial park at Kaesong, where South Korean manufacturers employ cheap North Korean labour, to be described as a model of successful ?reform?. Once again, Mr Kim showed how he puts his own survival over that of the North Koreans he brutalises.
Yet a joint agreement was announced on October 4th, something Mr Roh will be able to take home with relief. Gone were his hopes for great involvement in the North, but there was agreement to allow freight trains into Kaesong. There was a recommitment to help families divided by the civil war to meet (though a word from Mr Kim is all it would take to solve that sad problem). Talks will be sought with America and China to put a formal end to the civil war (though peace on the peninsula, these countries are likely to argue, can only come after its denuclearisation). Steps were promised (as, fruitlessly, they were at the 2000 summit) to reduce military tensions: defence ministers would meet, while a disputed western maritime area would see its fisheries jointly mined.
And, it's even more disconcerting to read DPRK Vice Foreign Minister Choi Su-hon at the UN say, that «...there was no need for the UN as a go-between in inter-Korean affairs, as inter-Korean dialogue is 'going well.'» I hope dialogue is much more multi-voiced, and includes as many «go-between's» as possible.
Vice Minister Choi also called the latest agreement in Beijing, agreeing to the disablement of Yongbyon by the end of the year, a «courageous decision». It remains for Pyongyang to manifest its courage. But, there are plenty of other ways the enthusiasm could get punctured.
At the request of the other five parties to the nuclear deal, the United States will lead disablement activities and provide initial funding. It will lead an expert group to North Korea, probably next week, to prepare for disablement.
North Korea also reaffirmed its commitment not to transfer nuclear materials, technology or know-how, the statement issued in Beijing added.
But the statement skirted the issue of when the country would be removed from the U.S. state sponsors of terrorism list, one of Pyongyang's key demands, saying only Washington would fulfill its commitments to begin that process in parallel with action on the ground.
Last week, Bush authorized $25 million in aid for the North, which would cover the cost of up to 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil.
China and South Korea have delivered initial fuel shipments and Russia is expected to do so too. But Japan has indicated it will not participate unless North Korea addresses the issue of Japanese citizens the North abducted in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nowhere, however, in the new agreement was what Reagan-era diplomats called a «third basket» ? a set of exchanges and commitments regarding how the communist regime treats its citizens, a feature of the Helsinki accords first signed in 1975 by 35 nations, including America and the Soviet Union.
A third-basket negotiation was the hope of a left-right coalition of human rights and religious leaders who on May 25 warned Secretary of State Rice that it «would oppose the provision of significant financial assistance to North Korea without progress on human rights issues.» The coalition included Human Rights Watch, the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Association of Evangelicals, Freedom House, and the George Soros-funded Open Society Institute.
One of the organizers of the coalition on North Korean Human Rights, Michael Horowitz, yesterday said the denuclearization agreement would lead to war. «This policy has increased the risk of war on the Korean peninsula. If we give Kim Jong Il money for his weapons programs, the future will bring more weapons not fewer weapons,» Mr. Horowitz said. «I fear that if this deal goes through, Kim Jong Il will seek to blackmail the world in less than two years with what may be the world's largest chemical and biological stockpile and missiles capable of delivering them.» Mr. Horowitz pointed out that when North Korea tested missiles last July, both Democrats and Republicans called for a military strike.
«It is sad and ironic that President Bush, the most forceful advocate of North Korean human rights, has signed off on a policy approach that seeks to legitimize and finance the Kim Jong Il regime in exchange for mere weapons promises on its part.»
Mr. Bush yesterday praised the agreement and said North Korea would provide a «complete and correct» accounting of «all its nuclear programs, nuclear weapons programs, materials, and any proliferation activity.» Mr. Bush also said the new agreement would «help secure the future peace and prosperity of the Northeast Asian region.»
Mr. Lefkowitz yesterday said human rights and national security are two complementary objectives in the administration's North Korea policy. «It is a false choice to say the United States policy should focus either on nuclear security or human rights; indeed, the two go hand and hand. We have very serious imminent interests in North Korea disarming,» he said.
The talks left Roh with an impression that progress remains hindered by Kim's deep suspicions.
«North Korea still has some skepticism about the South and doesn't trust it enough,» the South Korean president was quoted as saying at a Wednesday luncheon after his first two-hour session of talks with Kim. «We need greater effort to demolish a wall of mistrust.»
Roh said the North Korean leader was suspicious about terms such as «openness» and «reform,» suggesting that he sees any rapid move toward Chinese-style economic reforms as a threat to his autocratic rule.
Mistrust also was evident in observers' reactions to the nuclear deal struck in Beijing. Many experts raised concerns over whether the deal would fully disable the North's nuclear facilities, or merely leave them easy to reassemble.
As my wife often says in these times, Korean events lurch two steps forward, and then one step back. Is this the progress, or the reaction? Let's meet again on December, 31!
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