Frank Jannuzi is currently the director of AI's DC office. He worked for the State Department in the Bureau of East Asian & Pacific Affairs, and moved on to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under John Kerry and Joe Biden. Hope he will work with John Kerry on issues around the North.
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The
Road to Pyongyang Goes Through Helsinki
Here's
how you really solve the North Korean nuke problem.
BY
FRANK JANNUZI | APRIL 12, 2013
As
John Kerry makes his first trip to Asia as secretary of state, North Korea
seems poised to welcome him with a flurry of missile tests, and in Seoul,
Beijing, and Tokyo, he will surely discuss how to deal with North Korea's
recent provocations. But Washington's head-on approach to Pyongyang's nuclear
program has failed for decades, and the situation has only grown more
dangerous, as shown by the new reports that North Korea may have developed a
warhead small enough to fit on a ballistic missile. The
best way to resolve the ongoing nuclear crisis is to stop talking about nukes -- and instead focus on advancing North Korean human rights,
reorienting global attention from the North's plutonium
to its people.
Amnesty
International has long chronicled the DPRK's endemic human rights abuses,
under which millions suffer. That suffering takes many forms. Food insecurity
and malnutrition are widespread, and there are persistent reports of
starvation, particularly in more remote regions. The country's famines have
been under-reported inside and outside the DPRK because of severe restrictions
of movement and a near-total clamp-down on expression, information, and association.
Hundreds
of thousands of people -- including children -- are arbitrarily held in
political prison camps and other detention facilities, where they are subjected
to forced labor, denial of food as punishment, torture, and public executions.
In 2011, Amnesty used satellites to document the apparent expansion of some of
these prison camps. Last month, analysis of newly acquired images showed what
appeared to be the blurring of lines between a political prison camp
(Kwanliso-14) and the surrounding population, raising fears of new movement
controls and other restrictions on people living near prison camps.
In
January, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, said that
North Korea had "one of the worst -- but least understood and reported --
human rights situations in the world."
And last month the U.N. Human Rights Council voted to launch a commission of
inquiry into "systemic, widespread and grave" human rights violations
inside the DPRK, including crimes against humanity. This is a laudatory step --
even if there is little chance the North will cooperate with the inquiry -- but
the real question is not
whether there are severe human rights violations inside the DPRK. The
question is what can be done about
them.
For
the better part of three decades, the world has focused its attention on
ending the DPRK's nuclear weapons program, leaving the human element
largely as an afterthought. Those in the know have avidly watched every meter
of concrete poured at the Yongbyon nuclear facility, every shovel of dirt
removed from nuclear-test-site adits, and every kilometer of highway driven by
road-mobile missile systems. Sternly worded letters have been drafted, U.N.
Security Council resolutions adopted, a framework
agreement struck, cooling towers destroyed,
international monitoring schemes devised, a "Leap Day" deal crafted.
Nothing
has worked.
And
the coercive tactics favored by the international community to dissuade the
DPRK from developing nuclear weapons -- trade sanctions, diplomatic isolation,
travel restrictions, limits on cultural and educational exchanges, suspension
of humanitarian assistance -- have arguably bolstered the legitimacy and power
of those in Pyongyang who fear openness more than isolation. The marshals of
the Korean People's Army and their precocious leader are masters at playing
chess with a board populated by bombast, infantry divisions, artillery pieces,
Scud missiles, and nukes.
The
world needs to change the pieces and stop playing the DPRK's game.
The leaders of the DPRK are not motivated by a love of plutonium or
highly enriched uranium,
but by their quest for security and power. To
persuade them to abandon their nuclear weapons, the voices of the North
Korean people, especially elites in Pyongyang, will be more powerful
than those of foreigners. We can't be certain what North Koreans make of
their nation's circumstances, because there is no independent domestic media,
no known opposition political parties, no independent civil society, and
criticism of the government can lead to imprisonment. But we know that the
government makes extraordinary efforts to prevent its people from learning the
truth about the failures of their economy and the successes of the DPRK's
neighbors. By focusing its attention on the human dimension of the North Korean
challenge, the world can gradually change the attitudes of the elites and thereby
bring pressure on the leadership to see their nuclear program as a liability
rather than an asset.
The
DPRK's leaders will not be easily swayed. The Obama administration has held up
Myanmar as an example -- change course, and the United States will be your friend. But viewed from Pyongyang, the Libya
case study remains far more persuasive than the example of Myanmar, no matter
how gussied up. North Korea's leaders believe that Muammar al-Qaddafi's
decision to abandon his nuclear program allowed the subsequent overthrow of his
government.
The
Obama administration's approach has come to be known as "strategic
patience." I have learned over 24 years of dealing with the DPRK that
"wise and masterly inactivity" can
sometimes be an effective tactic. Right now, for instance, the first order of
business is to defuse the current crisis by avoiding tit-for-tat escalations,
restoring North-South cooperation at the Kaesong Industrial Complex, and
reiterating offers of dialogue. These steps require only patience.
But
inactivity, however masterful, must eventually give way to action. The smart
choice on the Korean Peninsula is to engage Pyongyang with the goal of
improving human rights, especially access to information. That's how
we will change the dynamic that has driven us from crisis to crisis -- and
ultimately resolve the nuclear issue.
It's
worked before. The 1975 Helsinki Accords and the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe that they created promoted reconciliation among
former adversaries and, ultimately, the end of the Cold War. The Helsinki
process established people-to-people channels of communication and cooperation
between East and West, with a heavy focus on human rights and exchanges. As
Korea expert Andrei Lankov has pointed out, contrary to the expectations
of the skeptics, those channels, over time, reshaped public opinion in the
Soviet Union, encouraging a process of opening up and reform.
South
Korean President Park Geun-hye has proposed a Northeast Asian Peace and
Cooperation Initiative to replace or augment the defunct Six Party Talks on
denuclearization. It is a worthy idea. If embraced by China, Russia, and the
United States, a Helsinki-style peace mechanism could be established with the
immediate goal of expanding contacts at all levels of North Korean society and
enhancing the access of the North Korean people, especially elites, to reliable
sources of information. Truth is a powerful antidote for fear and repression.
Governments and NGOs should address the nutritional and public health needs of
North Korea's malnourished and sick children, and the international community
should press for every North Korean prisoner to have not just humane living
conditions, but justice.
The
North Korean people are smart, hard-working, and ambitious, but they cannot
grasp a future obscured by the smoke of Musudan missile launches or hidden by
the barriers of international isolation. Putting human rights first, and doing
so through a regional mechanism that fosters openness, should be an alternative
to the policies that have failed for so many years to resolve to conflict on
the Korean Peninsula.
