Robert King and Human Rights in the DPRK

Image: Mission of the U.S., Geneva.

It's an understatement to suggest that North Korea has moved to the fore of public consciousness lately, if not necessarily in public conscience. The "useful clown" Dennis Rodman did much to assist this, causing people to break away, momentarily, from Project Runway and The Bachelor to wonder what exactly was so bad about Kim Jong Eun, really. In this respect, he was exponentially more effective than Ambassador Robert R. King.

If you're like me, you just thought, "Who?" In a minute, you will understand how perverse it is that we all know Dennis Rodman and no one knows Robert King.

For the past four years, Robert R. King has been the U.S. State Department's Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues. You'd think his name would come up once or twice in the course of western journalism, right? After all, the DPRK's reeducation and death camps have been existing operating 12 times longer than any Nazi concentration camp had (they were running one year before the nation was founded, in fact). After our global vow of "never again" to the conditions of the Holocaust, we've sat on our thumbs through the Khmer Rouge's ideological massacre, the Bosnian genocide, Rwanda's ethnic cleansing, the Balkans, Syria, and so many other massive slaughters of innocent populations. And now we find ourselves passively observing the whole thing again in North Korea, and we have the chance to step up and take action like we never have before, rather than saying what we would have done in hindsight.

And we will, right after The Mindy Project.

Downtime

My apologies (to my tens of thousands of paying readers) for not writing more often in this blog. You know how life catches up with you: two deaths in the family, nine days without water (harsh winter), car accident. The contours of life that disrupt an otherwise smooth coast to the grave.

I'm still keeping up on North Korea news (Rodman's out of rehab and drinking again; people are still analyzing Uncle Jang's death; DPRK agreed to family reunions and then reneged at the last minute, etc.) and will have something to post here soon. For the time being, permit me to engage in a little meta-talk.

I had to go back through all the old entries and labels and remove the hyphenation from all the North Korean names. While these names have been transliterated from hangul to English, and they don't use hyphens, the predominant editorial convention seems to hold that North Korean names are never hyphenated (Kim Jong Eun) and South Korean names are (Park Geun-Hye). Perhaps the only reason for this is to immediately distinguish which nation a Korean-named person is from? I have no idea, but I want to enforce this as a standard in my writing, along with the consistent spelling I've opted for.

Kenneth Bae: Longest-Serving North Korean Prisoner

Kenneth Bae presented to photographers in North Korea.

Image: AP Photo/Kim Kwang Hyon

In a perfect world, you would have heard about Kenneth Bae long before spectators and gawkers to the world arena were haranguing Dennis Rodman to petition on his behalf. That is, Rodman claimed to be "friends for life" with Kim Jong Eun, and the DPRK has imprisoned the American: the laity put two and two together and demanded that Rodman use his considerable clout to change Jong Eun's mind. As though he had the ability to do that; as though this political arrest had anything to do with "basketball diplomacy."

Sure, Rodman could have. Instead, he made an ass of himself and implied that Bae had done something to deserve being arrested by the North Koreans. But was that really so stupid? I would never accuse Rodman of strategy or cunning, but the suggestion that Bae had earned his arrest was more politic than the opposing claims. As Bae himself said in a recent and rare press conference, comments made by Vice President Biden and even Bae's own sister were more harmful than helpful: announcing that he was imprisoned unjustly, for no reason, was interpreted by Pyongyang as a challenge to their integrity and authority.

It's with good reason that the response of experts and analysts of North Korea has not been covered by western media. Most Americans, underinformed and emotional, would respond with hatred and violence rather than a few moments' quiet consideration on the subject, hearing what they have to say.

A Rising Wind of New Ideas

Camp Carroll, approximately.
Image: Google Maps

One of the things that spurred my curiosity about North Korea was wondering what the citizens thought of it.

My perceptions of North Korea have evolved over time. My first experience with it was in 1990, when I was stationed in South Korea at Camp Carroll. This is toward the southern end of the peninsula, where the stations were more relaxed. I trained in the field once in my entire year, spending the rest of the time drinking and seeing the sights around Waekwon. It was nothing like being stationed up north on the DMZ, where maybe you came out of the field for two weeks each year.

Well, one weekend a dozen of us went up north to cross-train in other weapons at Camp Casey, right on the DMZ. We fired M203 mounted grenade launchers, sending dummy rounds of orange day-glo chalk at a mountainside, to get a sense of firing power and trajectory. Unfortunately, I wasn't ready for the kick on my rifle: upon pulling the trigger, my M16A2 jerked up and hit me in the face and I collapsed in my foxhole. The sergeants hauled me out and made me sit out the rest of that day's exercises. I was pretty disappointed, but to be fair, there was a little chunk of my eyebrow in the front sight of my rifle. I made up for it the next day, when despite language barriers I called in a brush fire that was spreading on our targeting range.

Media Bias re North Korea

Image: Reuters

Just a brief post on how western media treats news on North Korea. Journalists and writers permit themselves an insulting bias when representing the DPRK, and sometimes this extends to gleefully perpetuating wild rumors and blatant libel. Like I keep saying, there are plenty of entirely valid crimes and human rights violations to play up, without needing to resort to name-calling and gossip.

The problem with this is that it precludes nuanced understanding. When western media claims that all of North Korea does or thinks something, it conflates the iron-fisted regime with dozens of millions of people starving and imprisoned throughout the countryside. Those people deserve our sympathy and assistance, but slandering them all as "the enemy" impedes real understanding.