North Korea

Here's an interesting article from the Telegraph newspaper which tells the unlikely tale of a retired Australian judge doing his bit to hold President Kim Jon-un and his Stalinist monarchy in North Korea to account. 

I wish Mike Kirby well and his assessment of the North Korean regime is spot on - just a pity that there are countries around the world, notably China and Russia, who are willing to turn a blind eye to Kim Jong-un's excesses.

North Korea atrocities: Sometimes a polite letter can be a pistol shot

It has taken a retired Australian judge to show us how to deal with Kim Jong-un over the country's crimes against humanity




By Colin Freeman

How do you deal with someone you suspect of being one of the most evil leaders ever to have stalked the earth? Do you brand them a tyrant and then order in the tanks? Do you post them a pack of exploding cigars?

Or do you send them a polite letter, respectfully reminding them of their responsibilities as head of state, and pointing out that at some future date, they could be rendering themselves liable to prosecution?

That appears to have been the approach of Michael Kirby, the retired Australian judge who has just delivered a detailed report on the appalling human rights abuses committed in Kim Jong-un’s North Korea. It reveals how, during the 66 miserable years of the Democratic People’s Republic, hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of “unspeakable atrocities” – a record that Mr Kirby compares to that of Nazi Germany.

Testimonies gathered from defectors included an account of a woman forced to drown her own babies, and of Gulag inmates deliberately starved to death. Their fellow prisoners were then forced to burn their bodies and use the ashes as fertiliser.

Well aware of the practical difficulties of ever getting Kim Jong-un into any international criminal court, Mr Kirby did, none the less, decide to drop the Supreme Leader a line to set out his concerns.

The tone of his letter is pretty gentle, given that Kirby is accusing Kim of crimes against humanity. He starts off by reminding North Korea’s Supreme Leader that even if he isn’t committing them in person, anyone with that title may later find it hard to claim that they weren’t high in the chain of command. He then politely warns that a prosecution could “render accountable all those, including possibly yourself, who may be responsible for crimes against humanity”.

Given its slightly bureaucratic language, you might think that Mr Kirby was taking Kim to task over a minor violation of planning law, rather than the wholesale slaughter and torture of his own people.

As such, his missive attracted a few sarcastic jokes yesterday, which pointed out that, as long as North Korea has nuclear weapons and Chinese support, a “strongly worded letter of complaint” was not going to change much.

But by the UN’s standards, this is pretty good stuff. Too often, the organisation’s envoys waste time on ill-disguised political attacks, as did Raquel Rolnik, the UN special rapporteur on housing, whose recent report calling for the suspension of Britain’s so-called bedroom tax was described as a “misleading Marxist diatribe” by the Government. At other times, they come across as simply hamstrung, avoiding direct criticism for fear of upsetting China or Russia.

But Mr Kirby has at least gone for a bit of Aussie plain speaking, and in the process reminded everyone that Kim’s disgusting gangster state – a “shock to the conscience of humanity” – should be a matter of concern to us all.

Too often, North Korea’s hereditary tyrants have been seen as just cartoon crackpots, people too mad to be taken seriously. Instead, we focus on Kim Jong-un’s mistresses and his dreadful haircut, on his dad’s fondness for fortune tellers and funding North Korean Godzilla-type films, rather than the cold-blooded killing they have both ordered.

This is, after all, a regime that keeps 120,000 political prisoners in its Gulags. This is the land where a man was thrown in jail for wiping up a spilt drink with an old newspaper featuring Kim Jong-il. This is a country where, during the famine of the Nineties, hundreds of thousands of families were starved to death to ensure that the army, police and trusted cadres could fill their stomachs. Those children who didn’t starve outright suffered serious malnutrition, creating entire generations of developmentally stunted people.

This is also the land of Jee Heon-a, a woman whose testimony to the UN panel could have come from Buchenwald or Auschwitz. Ms Jee told how, in one camp where she was held, a fellow female inmate who had been repatriated after escaping to neighbouring China was told that she could not keep her baby because there was a chance it had been conceived with a Chinese father. That would contravene North Korea’s strict racial purity laws, and so it was that she was ordered by a prison guard to drown the new-born child herself in a bucket of water.

Mr Kirby may not be able to stop North Korea’s atrocities. But he has done the world a favour in reminding us that when we talk about Kim Jong-un, the best comparisons are Hitler and Stalin, not someThunderbirds villain whose eccentricities belie the snuff movie he is starring in.