Jared Genser: Two legacies as different as
good and evil
By Jared Genser , 5:30 AM Monday Dec 26,
2011
In a strange, and some might say divinely
inspired juxtaposition, Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-il died around the same time
about a week ago.
Their lives and their impact on people's
lives were extraordinarily different. It is therefore unsurprising that much as
Havel was himself deeply concerned about the fate of the 24 million people of
North Korea, there is little evidence to suggest Kim had much concern about
anyone but himself. But what is troubling is that analysis of the impact of
Kim's death by most experts and commentators has ignored Havel's observations
about North Korea. Havel
suffered under the yolk of oppression in Soviet-occupied
Czechoslovakia as a dissident
playwright, poet, and polemicist. His writings, actions, and years in prison
inspired his people to rise up against their totalitarian government,
culminating in the Velvet Revolution and his election as President. He spent 13
years in office, being one of a few dissidents
who have become effective Presidents.
And in his post-presidential years, he
personally provided enormous aid and support to dissident movements and
oppressed people around the world who yearned to be free.
But his enduring legacy will be his
analysis of totalitarianism, what enables it to succeed, and how to oppose it.
In simplified form, he often said "truth and love must prevail over lies
and hate". On the other hand, Kim was a man on his own mission - to enrich
himself, maintain power at any price, and to crush anyone who stood in his way.
He was, in short, his father's son. It is hard to overstate the level of
oppression he exerted on the population of the Hermit Kingdom. The abuses in
North Korea under his rule were among the most severe in the world in the last
20 years.
As pro bono counsel to Havel, Elie Wiesel
and former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, I worked with the
Committee on Human Rights in North Korea and produced two reports on the human
rights and humanitarian situation in the country.
The reports urged the invocation of the
responsibility to protect doctrine, the obligation that all states have to
prevent mass atrocities.
We concluded that North Korea was
committing crimes against humanity against its own people. During its late
1990s famine, some one million people and perhaps many more died, and the
population remains at constant risk of starvation with some 37 per cent of
children chronically malnourished.
North Korea also operates a vast gulag
system, with some 200,000 people imprisoned for real or imagined offences.
These camps impose a brutal regimen on their populations, including forced
labour, starvation-level rations, and widespread torture.
It is estimated more than 400,000 people
have died in these camps in the past two decades. In that context, we urged the
United Nations to create a commission of inquiry into crimes against humanity
going on in North Korea.
Such an action would both document what has
been happening and make recommendations on how the situation could be improved.
It would also put pressure on the regime to engage with the United Nations on
these critical issues.
Most of the analysis about the impact of
Kim Jong-il's death has focused on questions about the stability of the new
regime, its nuclear weapons programme, and what all this might mean
for China, South Korea, and the world. I suspect this would not have been
Havel's focus. I vividly recall a conversation with him about our work on
North Korea where he made a simple observation - that the North Korean people's greatest concerns are their own
survival and the abuses they suffer, not the country's nuclear programme.
Havel's profound truth should not be
forgotten. While the external impact of North Korea on the world is an obvious
focus, the international community continues to have an unfulfilled obligation
to help ameliorate the suffering of the North Korean people.
* Jared
Genser is a human rights lawyer and co-editor of The Responsibility to
Protect: The Promise of Stopping Mass Atrocities in Our Times, Oxford
University Press, 2011
