Why does the North Korean regime react fanatically to the International community’s condemnation of

To recall a UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) Report on North Korea, in 2014, was shocked. The gross violations of human rights abuses in North Korea have explored throughout thousands of North Korean escapees’ testimonies. Over 400 pages explanations of the inhumanity accounts, COI Report defined “a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world” (COI Report 2014).

A state does not have any parallel in the contemporary world is comparable context with the crimes of Communist regimes and the victimisation of 100 million people in the 20th century (Courtois et al 1994: 4). The atrocities should have ended with the collapse of the Communist regimes.

Nevertheless, it is shame that our world continues to spell out this even after Frank Fukuyama called, ‘the end of history.’

What is happening to our world today? The victims’ crying is heard through the human rights violations of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, persecution, starvation, oppression and coercion; in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Eritrea, China, Vietnam, Burma and North Korea and on. Freedom House Report of 2018 has concerned that a total of 195 countries in the world; 45% are free, 30% are partly free, and 25% are not free (Freedom House 2018).

In Syria, Bashar al- Assad regime should have ceased to kill their own civilians. The chemical attack in Douma on 7 April 2018, a report from the World Health Organisation (WHO) that 500 people have been affected by a chemical attack. More than 70 people had reportedly died after the attack, according to the WHO (BBC 2018). The UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, condemned its ‘barbaric targeting of civilians.’

How long do we have to rephrase this word of enough is enough?

In North Korea, the brutal and several crimes against human life is categorised by COI report, the nation’s unspeakable conditions to what is happening of “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions,” as well as severe religious persecution, enforced disappearances, starvation [assassination] should lead, the inquiry recommended, to a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC)” (Rogers et al, 2015).

A totalitarian country of North Korea has demonstrated its theoretical concept of a total ‘being a form of a personalised rule by a leader, aided by a subordinate elite and ideology,’ and seeks to dominate a total control of ‘state, society and individual’ (Schapiro 1972: 102, 119).

You can born freely in North Korea. Nonetheless, after your birth, you have no option to choose. You’re automatically integrated into the Kim family, the kind of a society is claimable of a contemporary slavery under the Kim dynasty.

The nation breached the international norms and regulations, for instance, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), in 2005, that ‘the primary responsibility of states to protect their own populations from the four crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’ (Bellamy 2010: 143).

State sovereignty as a responsibility and affirmed the notion of sovereignty is not just protection from outside –but the matter of a state having great responsibility for their own population’s welfare, promote freedom of rights and justice.

The North Korean regime does not uphold Universal Declaration of Human Rights Charters (UDHR). Article 1 emphasised that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity rights.” North Korea’s human rights principles are their own interpretation of this view, the absolute loyalty to the leader, party and state.

This is their own Communist dictatorial ideology. It has to be in the opposite direction, against democratic nations’ supporting the international human rights charters. The consequences of this North Korean peoples’ basic freedom of speech, expression, movement and faith or belief is denied.

Freedom of speech is completely denied. The referring of the members of the Kim family or critically described, you could have disappeared during a night and sent to a prison camp. For the expression of outside cultures, such as music, McDonald, Coca-Cola, Jeans, foreign hairstyle or talk about a foreign love story could lead to types of punishment. Your travel from one local to another you must have a permission from the authorities. Freedom of faith or belief in the nation is prohibited. If you have possessed a Bible or the Christian materials you could have ended up in a political prison, or, sometimes used to test biological and chemical weapons. Every single of movement is controlled and monitored by the regime.

Stalin and Mao’s legacy of Military First policy, a kind of Red Army exist in North Korea and protect the regime, not the civilians. The regime warned you are being prohibited to speak or express freely, therefore, your eyes must be blind, and your ears must be blocked. The coercion, oppression and persecution are a daily process to every single of the North Korean citizen.

One of the North Korean experts, Steven Saxonberg (2013), pointed out that no other dictatorial regimes have ever succeeded in becoming like North Korea. The continuing conditions of starvation and oppression under the absolute totalitarian rule and its practice of forbidding of different political, cultural or economic thought in North Korea is a political crime and justifies severest punishments.

The numbers of political prisoners in the camps are estimated to be from 200,000 to 250,000 (Saxonber 2013: 124). Moreover, when the United Nations estimated of 400,000 people have died in the camps in the last 30 years (Alton & Chidley 2013:123). The United Nations reports that approximately 30 concentration camps are in North Korea today. This is a 21st century Stalinist type monstrosity.

North Korea’s own socialism and its principles in political, economic and cultural spheres and does not provide for civil and political rights. Being structuralised of the Social-Political Classification System sub-divides the entire population into three classes; core-class (high-class, 25%), wavering-class (middle-class, 55%), and hostile-class (lower-class, 20%) (Collins 2012: III).

Adopted in the doctrines of Stalinism and Maoism, as Juche ideology itself emphasises the democratic political participation of political study, criticism, and self-criticism so that role of public campaigns in mobilising the population for specific goals, such as how to fight against the west. Juche is North Koreans’ guiding rule, the combines of politics, social and economic control in one philosophical term. Given that Juche ideology seeks to underpin theoretically and practically, such as political independence (own socialism), economic self-sufficiency (isolated economy), and self-reliance in defence (nuclear power).

To put another way, the position of the Kim family as the head of the society perpetuates their personality cults, however, are justified by Juche theory or ideology. While this theory represents the Kim family, and under its justification, any element can be re-interpreted because this theory/ideology is an essential part of the survival of the Kim dynasty.

To think, speak, and acts as the Kim family is required in every step of the education and society. Steven Saxonberg analysed this from primary school to university, subjects aimed at strengthening the personality cult account for 33.3% of the total curriculum (2013: 125). Institutionalisation causes controlled the North Korean society the scale of human rights abuses is led by own government, not the outside intervention.

The human rights abuses of the North Korean affects the most vulnerable are women and children. Almost a third of all pregnant and lactating mothers and more than 200,000 children are estimated to suffer from acute malnutrition, according to Care International Report in January 2018 (Ratcliff 2018).

What is undeniable from this is that if you have seen North Korea’s human rights charters, it is completely showpiece. North Korea showpieces selective acceptance of the international human rights norms in order to avoid isolation. There is a great contradiction between these constitutional laws, and demanding of citizens’ completed loyalty to the leader, party and state.

This regime has lived for 70 years. Its nuclear button threatened world’s peace and security yesterday. But today, the regime approaching peace process with its abusive dictatorial ideology. Their constitutional law is used and abused against the people’s conception of basic human rights, for the purpose of the dear leader. At the same time, there are no comparisons of other nations’ political ideologies and systems available for ordinary North Korean people.

The nation is closed from inside by its handful bureaucrats, not the populations. Kim Il-Sung once emphasised to Deng Xiaoping's (who led China’s economic Glasnost in 1979) advice to open the economic doors in the 1980s; ‘When you open a window flies come in’ (French 2015: 203).

The regime’s forced labour maintains in Russia of around tens of thousands of workers and the restaurants in China or those of illegal activities of weapon smuggling finance the regime’s expenditure. The continuing trade of ballistic missiles and chemical weapons with third countries were detected.

At least four times of ballistic missiles and weapon experts and technicians sent to Syria from 2016 to March 2017. Exported several types of weapons, including the conventional weapons, ballistic missile systems, and multi-purpose rocket launchers to Burma and Zambia, and surface-to-air missiles and air defence radars to Mozambique.

According to the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee Report on 16 March, North Korean regime raised about $2 billion profits through illegal exports from January to September 2017.

Moreover, North Korean women’s human trafficking has remained in top 3 world ranking table, according to Trafficking in Persons Report in 2017. Social Security Act providing the severe surveillance, media blockade and established distrust relationship between friends and neighbours, and the chronically deprived food of amongst 18 million, which is 70% of the country’s total 25 million population (Ratcliff 2018).

What about total denial of religious persecution, up to 70,000 Christian prisoners to be imprisoned due to their beliefs and that more than 75% of Christians do not survive, (McKay, 2017). Religion in North Korea is regarded as clandestine activities and is a political crime.

Database Centre for North Korea Human Rights report in 2016, collected a total number of 65,282 human rights violations cases over the past years. Those of 53,286 (81.6%) cases were directly witnessed or experienced violations, and 11,996 (18.4%) violations were learned through different sources (NKDB 2016). These cases were identified, including the right to individual dignity and liberty, movement, forced relocation, arrest, imprisonment, unfair trial, survival, labour rights, political participation and health rights.

The continuing worsening food situation in North Korea tops the list of world’s most neglected humanitarian crises. While the media highlights the Third Inter-Korean Summit and a US-North Korea dialogue in April and May, DPRK’s severe food shortages mean that an estimated two in five of its population are undernourished. “More than 1.2m online articles found that NK food scarcity was the most neglected globally,” according to Care International study in 2017 (Ratcliff 2018).

After the severe famine in the 1990s which killed over 3 million people, people did not become dependency on the state-run distribution but rely on private trading in semi-tolerated grey markets in order to survive. Certainly, some improvement of the food situation was lifted up by illegal market trading, farms on the mountains, and the commodities smuggling from China. People have learned to how to survive throughout many years of starvation.

However, this does not mean people have freed from starvation. The fact is that the state does not willingly open the economic door like China and Vietnam did for their economies at least. Lack of resources within this isolated country and sanctions and the simultaneous Military First policy means that food from the collective farms has provided for the millions of soldiers in North Korea.

When the economic and healthcare systems do not work, human rights abuses are worse, and more people become desperate to escape and the regime resists against this. This is a kind of survival game for North Korean people.

How to survive when there is a lack of resource and continuing human rights violations?

The North Korean regime has long kept its own ideology of socialism in our own style. The focus is on the dictatorship and its absolute control ensures these systematic violations. The dignity of North Korean people and their civil and political rights are not recognised. Christian Solidarity Worldwide’s report over the past 10 years in North Korea remains extremely concerned about the ongoing, grave and widespread violations of human rights across the country and in particular for political and religious prisoners (CSW Report 2018).

The report highlighted the survival of the North Korean regime which uses the term our own style of human rights and society, which largely undermines the concept of universality of human rights. The regime is in the survival game on both insides (by using the coercion and oppression) and outside (by threatening the nuclear button or use it as a bargaining chip for negotiation).

How far can the regime sustain this situation? Andrew Heywood (2012) argued that human beings are little more than biological machines, conditioned to act to external stimuli. This conditioning has caused over 27 years starvation, and 70 years of incarcerating citizens in prison.

How do we open the prison door? From my experiences in the prison in China and North Korea, I could not open it from inside. The prison door opens from outside. If we pulling this door from outside and inside North Korean people to push it so that we can open it together before too many people die in the hunger game.

The North Korean regime insisted, the human rights issues pointed the International Community in North Korea was the intervention of domestic affairs and aimed at overthrowing the leadership.

This is another way of expression that the North Korean regime is afraid to accept the international human rights charters and uphold human dignity and justice. If the regime accepts these regulations and norms, there will be no place for the Kim dynasty.

Bibliography

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