Sunday, July 18, 2010

Well, that might get their attention...

Claudia Rosett of Forbes doesn't care much for North Korea:
North Korea masquerades as a sovereign state, with its United Nations membership, diplomatic perquisites and outsized presence on the radar of threats to the free world. But its workings more closely resemble a racketeering and murderous fiefdom, a huge slave enclave where 23 million people live in thrall to Kim and his grotesque personality cult.

The Amnesty International report joins the enormous stack of damning books, testimony, articles and other reports that have come out during the 16 years since Kim Jong Il inherited rule of North Korea's totalitarian state from his father, Kim Il Sung, in 1994. The world has heard in ample, extensive, credible and horrifying detail, repeatedly, about the stunted, hungry children; the North Korean gulag; the famine which, as a direct result of catastrophically cruel and self-serving state policy, led to the deaths of an estimated 1 million or more North Koreans.
And her solution is to kick them out of the United Nations:
An excellent start would be to give Kim the official illegitimacy he deserves by kicking North Korea out of the United Nations. Clearly that is an idea so far outside the bounds of today's global etiquette that among the 192 members of today's U.N., it's not even on the table.

But it should be. There is no rule that says North Korea must have a seat, and there are some very basic U.N. rules that indicate it shouldn't. Just 20 years ago neither North nor South Korea was a member of the U.N. It was only in 1991 that both were admitted, on the same day, Sept. 17. In receiving this prize of a place at the erstwhile parliament of nations, North Korea's totalitarian regime piggy-backed on the economic progress and political liberalization of South Korea-- which was at that stage evolving quickly from an impoverished dictatorship into a thriving democracy.
Indeed, if the goal of offering both Koreas UN membership at the same time was to coax the DPRK into improving, the idea has failed. But that's not really why they both entered at the same time. It was actually a reflection of the delicate balance between the Seoul and Pyongyang governments and their recognition abroad: The impractical One-Korea Policy practiced by so many countries could only be scrapped through the adoption of an evenly applied Two-Korea Policy, hence the two countries entering the UN at the same time in the same manner, to show that neither Korea was higher or more representative than the other.

But Ms Rosett makes a valid point: the Pyongyang regime has shown that it cannot follow the rules and therefore doesn't deserve to play. The drawback to this innovative solution, however, is that it severs ties that may be needed down the road, when/if the regime were to collapse or be in its death throes.

1 comment:

  1. i see you are seeing and understanding NK better! much bettr than ms. claudia! congratulatiosn

    ReplyDelete

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