Next Stop: Pyongyang , Neocons and the North Korea Freedom Act

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http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10336

Next Stop: Pyongyang


John Feffer is the author most recently of North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis.


There is no Vaclav Havel of North Korea. Don't expect to turn up a Solidarity-like trade union or a Democracy Wall movement on your next visit to Pyongyang. Nor, as far as anyone can tell, is a North Korean version of Boris Yeltsin or even Mikhail Gorbachev waiting in the wings to shake up the ruling party. Leader Kim Jong Il is pushing ahead with economic reform, and the number of cell phones—to quote one index of change—has gone from zero to 20,000 in the last few years. But as you might imagine from its woeful lack of political diversity, North Korea's human rights situation remains dismal—prison camps, summary executions and virtually no freedom of speech, assembly or press.

Although human rights organizations have not been able to monitor the situation within North Korea, reports from defectors and refugees converge to a remarkable degree. Minus some exaggerations or misrepresentations at the margins, there is little disagreement about the state of North Korean affairs. Consensus on what to do about the problem, however, remains elusive.

North Korea Freedom Act

Neoconservatives in the United States have a simple answer: squeeze North Korea until the current government collapses. But restricting trade and preventing the country from joining international financial institutions is not enough. A bill pending in the Senate—the North Korea Freedom Act—aims to encourage refugee flow out of the country as well as increase the bandwidth of information flow into the country. It also attempts to tie human rights to any bilateral agreements. This strategy draws inspiration from "Scoop" Jackson, a conservative Democrat from Washington state, who argued during the U.S.-Soviet detente of the '70s in favor of linking human rights to arms control treaties—as much to uplift the former as to wreck the chances of the latter.