A few days ago, the UN released a long-awaited report on human rights abuses in North Korea. It comes as little surprise to hear that the government of the Hermit Kingdom is abusing its own citizens, but the actual details of that abuse remain sobering. Collective punishment continues (though the report found it isn’t as widespread as initially believed), with entire families imprisoned for the crimes of a single member; freedom of speech is non-existent; hunger is rife, partially due to the poor state of the North Korean economy, but also because of the government reserving food for the most ‘useful’ citizens and the army; freedom of movement is severely constrained, with access to the relatively luxurious capital of Pyongyang only available to those who show loyalty to the party; and, of course, there are the labour camps – unimaginably grim places in which ‘enemies’ of the regime are worked to death, starved, beaten, tortured, and forced to kill their own children. The UN have even compared the crimes of the regime to those of the Nazis.
At the moment, and perhaps for the next week or two, there will be outrage in the western newspapers and the governments of Europe and North America will make statements condemning Kim Jong-un and his fellow leaders. The North Korean leaders are committing some of the gravest crimes against humanity ever seen, and the USA and others must be seen to stand up against them. But what will be done to actually change the situation for ordinary North Koreans? Despite continual claims by the west to humanitarian goals and a desire to spread democracy, nothing will be done to aid this slowly dying country.
Humanitarian intervention has, of course, happened before – some countries have been deemed to be behaving so badly towards their population that the west has no choice but to get involved and set things straight. Curiously, these countries always tend to be the ones with the most oil – Iraq, Libya, possibly Syria in the future – or the ones which crossed a line and attacked a superpower – such as Afghanistan. This is, of course, just a coincidence – there’s no way that decisions on humanitarian intervention would be based on the profit and benefits that could accrue to the west, because that wouldn’t be a very humanitarian way of looking at things, would it?
Truthfully, North Korea’s leaders know they can continue on their current path without facing the consequences of military attack or a withdrawal of food aid. Korea has no oil, and few major natural resources in general, so the west has no pressing need to bring it onside. It also has the backing of a superpower, China, and is at least tolerated by another member of the UN Security Council, Russia. Ultimately, intervening in North Korea would bring no benefits and a whole lot of hassle to the west, so I’m sure we’ll find that the lives of North Koreans are not as important as the lives of the Iraqis and Afghans we ‘liberated’ from their dictatorships.
Once again, this seems like an example of the hypocrisy of western governments – preaching humanitarian aims while really only considering the geopolitical economics of profit and loss for themselves. Those governments need to eventually decide what it is they really stand for – either the lives of the unprofitable North Koreans are as important as those of the oil-rich Iraqis, or they’re not. It’s time for the west to be honest about its values, and admit that they sometimes have to put ethics aside in the name of politics.
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