Trump downplays North Korea’s deplorable human rights record
At Tuesday’s historic summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, the US president played down the severity of human rights violations in North Korea. Kim Tong-hyung reports...
AFEW months ago Donald Trump used his first State of the Union address to condemn the cruelty of North Korea’s government.
But after his historic summit on Tuesday with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who he described as “very smart” and having a “great personality”, Mr Trump seemed to play down the severity of human rights violations in the country.
“It’s rough,” Mr Trump acknowledged after being asked about North Korea’s human rights record, but added: “It’s rough in a lot of places, by the way. Not just there.”
Few expected him to seriously raise North Korea’s horrific human rights problems during his first meeting with Mr Kim, which was mainly about addressing the threat of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons.
But his post-summit comments drew an angry reaction from activists, who have spent years highlighting North Korea’s extensive crimes against humanity.
“By leaving human rights out of the final statement, the Trump administration effectively told North Korea that human rights are not a US priority,” Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, said.
“For North Koreans, this means continued public executions, restrictions on movement, brutally punishing three generations of a family when one member ‘offends’, and an absolute prohibition on any civil and political rights, on top of inadequate access to food, housing, education and healthcare.”
In his speech to Congress in January, Mr Trump lashed out at the “depraved character” of Mr Kim’s government. He pointed to invited family members of Otto Warmbier, an American detainee who died after returning from North Korea with severe injuries, and a North Korean defector who lost a leg while scavenging for food and travelled thousands of miles on crutches to escape.
Here we take a look at North Korea’s dismal record of rights abuse:
■ Prison camps...
While North Korea officially denies it, outside governments and human rights group believe the country runs massive prison camps where people accused of political crimes are detained without trial and often without their families being notified about their whereabouts.
South Korea’s Korea Institute for National Unification, a state-sponsored think-tank, estimates that as many as 120,000 inmates were held at the country’s five major political prisons as of 2013.
It is believed that the inmates, many accused of insulting the North’s leadership or attempting to escape to South Korea, are subject to horrific conditions, including forced labour, torture and rape. Inmates are often executed, some publicly, for disobeying orders, the institute said in a study. The death tolls are further exacerbated by torture, denial of adequate medical care and high incidence of work accidents, said a 2014 UN report.
“The key to the political system is the vast political and security apparatus that strategically uses surveillance, coercion, fear and punishment to preclude the expression of any dissent,” said the UN report. “Public executions and enforced disappearance to political prison camps serve as the ultimate means to terrorise the population into submission.”
The report said gross violations are also being committed in North Korea’s ordinary prison system, including torture and deliberate starvation. Some of these prisons are labour camps that the North claims aim to reform prisoners through work.
■ Executions...
Since assuming his father’s position in 2011, Mr Kim, a third-generation hereditary leader, has shown a brutal side while consolidating his power. In what critics called a “reign of terror”, he executed a slew of members of the North Korean old guard, including his uncle Jang Seong Thaek, who was convicted of treason, and senior government officials accused of slighting his leadership.
He has also been accused of ordering the assassination of his estranged half-brother Kim Jong Nam last year at a Malaysian airport by assailants using a lethal nerve agent.
South Korea said in 2016 that Mr Kim ordered the execution of vicepremier Kim Yong Jin.
Seoul officials told reporters Kim Yong Jin had been accused of sitting in a “disrespectful” way during a meeting of the North’s rubber-stamp parliament.
In 2015, South Korea’s spy agency said Kim Jong Un ordered his defence chief, Hyon Yong Chol, executed with an anti-aircraft gun in front of hundreds of spectators at a military shooting range. Mr Hyon had complained about Mr Kim’s leadership, the National Intelligence Service said.
■ Detainees...
North Korea has abducted thousands of South Koreans and other foreigners to use them for spying and propaganda purposes or as political pawns to gain concessions from outside governments.
The abductees include South Korean government officials, students and fishermen and also Japanese citizens. Most of them were kidnapped between the 1950s and 1970s. In recent years, North Korea has often detained South Korean activists, many of them evangelical Christians who smuggle out defectors and send anti-Pyongyang literature and Bibles into the North through its border with China.
Ahead of Mr Kim’s summit with Mr Trump, North Korea released three American detainees as a gesture of goodwill.
However, the country only released Mr Warmbier last year after he had lapsed into a coma. After his death at a US hospital, North Korea called itself the “biggest victim” of the incident and denied that it cruelly treated or tortured Mr Warmbier, who had been sentenced to 15 years of hard labour for crimes that included stealing a propaganda poster.
According to Seoul, North Korea abducted at least 3,835 South Koreans after the 1950-53 Korean War. While most were eventually released or escaped back to the South, Seoul’s Unification Ministry says 516 had never returned as of 2015.
TWO unpredictable egomaniacs meeting in Singapore was a long-shot for a nuclear deal, but as Winston Churchill once said, jaw-jaw is always better than war-war.
Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un coming together for their on-off-on talks had the potential to be a complete disaster or an unlikely amazing success – what we got was a welcome development somewhere in between.
The wording of a document signed by the two schoolground bullies fell some way short of the dramatic denuclearisation claim Trump made at the end of the historic meeting.
He described it as a “very comprehensive” agreement that would “take care of a very big and very dangerous problem for the world”.
Cynics would say the five-hour meeting proved to be little more than a meeting about having more meetings, but for the first time the States has a very real diplomatic relationship with North Korea.
After more than a year of venomous barbs and apocalyptic threats of war, the summit between the two men was indeed a relief, with its handshakes and courtesy.
Trump deserves credit for setting in motion a process that, for the time being, will keep the two former enemies talking to each other.
But he should hold off creating a space for the Nobel Peace Prize on the White House mantelpiece just yet.
The statement he signed with Kim was strikingly thin on real action, with little evidence of any substantial progress, despite his claims.
The document does not differ greatly from the agreement issued by Kim and the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, after their meeting on the southern side of the demilitarised zone at the end of April.
The truth is, Kim and Trump were never going to appear in Singapore and sign a peace treaty.
China and South Korea would need to attend for such a development, and far more time would be required to negotiate a settlement.
But the wins were obvious and none more so than for Kim.
The dictator achieved his wish to appear an equal on a global stage with the president of the world’s mightiest military power.
He also got what his father and grandfather never did – a meeting with an American president, the legitimacy of being treated as an equal as a nuclear power and his country’s flag standing side by side with the Star Spangled banner.
And while American sanctions remain in place, his country will not see the imposing of any new sanctions while other countries are expected to begin easing theirs. Trump meanwhile, insisted he secured concessions from Kim, including a nuclear and missile test suspension that is already in its seventh month, and the destruction of a missile test site and an engine test site.
But what about the main goal, denuclearisation? “We’re starting that process very quickly, very, very quickly,” said Trump. The statement lacked his previous mantra-like demand or any real substance that denuclearisation not just be complete but also be verifiable and irreversible. It also contained no definition of “denuclearisation,” which the States and North Korea interpret differently.
But, despite the obvious shortcomings, the President should be commended in his desire to have North Korea abandon its nuclear bombs. The coming together of two enormous and unpredictable egos to discuss one giving up nuclear weapons was a volatile mix that could have ended horribly. Thankfully it appears that the gamble paid off.
Trump deserves credit for setting in motion a process that, for the time being, will keep the two former enemies talking to each other. But he should hold off creating a space for the Nobel Peace Prize on the White House mantelpiece just yet.The statement he signed with Kim was strikingly thin on real action...