If there is a country with a worse human-rights record than North Korea, the world has yet to know it. You'd think South Korea would cheer anyone who draws attention to the terrible depredations endured by what it likes to call its brothers and sisters in the North. Instead, President Roh Moo Hyun's government has denounced an op-ed article that ran in these pages Friday by Jay Lefkowitz, President Bush's special envoy for human rights in North Korea.
The headline over Mr. Lefkowitz's article was "Freedom for All Koreans." He expressed the radical notion that humanitarian assistance to Pyongyang deserves to actually reach the North Korean people. Aid should be transparent, he said, to keep it from being diverted to the military or sold on the black market, where the cash can be used for unintended purposes. (Think WMD or counterfeiting or drugs.) "By channeling large amounts of unmonitored aid to North Korea," he wrote, "some governments may unwittingly help prop up the regime."
Mr. Lefkowitz was too diplomatic to name names, but the message came through loud and clear in Seoul. An unnamed official in the Unification Ministry, quoted by the Yonhap News Agency, condemned the article on Sunday, accusing Mr. Lefkowitz of interfering in Seoul's internal affairs and of trying to "put a brake on the mood of inter-Korean reconciliation." He called Mr. Lefkowitz's attitude "inhumane and anti-human rights."
A spokesman for the Unification Ministry used nearly identical words when we called yesterday to confirm the report. "It is a unilateral and narrow-minded thought as well as an antihumanitarian and inhumane attitude to talk about [the] North Korean human-rights issue on one hand and turn a blind eye to [the] dire situation facing the North Korean residents on the other hand," he said.
The Unification Ministry also took umbrage at Mr. Lefkowitz's concerns about possible worker exploitation at Kaesong, just north of the Demilitarized Zone, where 15 South Korean companies recently opened an industrial park using North Korean labor. The U.S. envoy noted that the workers are paid less than $2 a day -- before government deductions. "There is no guarantee that the workers see even this small amount," he wrote. Mr. Lefkowitz shows a "biased view," the spokesman said.
It's safe to say that South Korea's criticism is unlikely to get Mr. Lefkowitz in hot water with his boss, George W. Bush. The U.S. President has said repeatedly that "all Koreans" deserve to live in freedom. A good indication of his thinking on North Korea is the prominence he has given to the issue of human rights in the North.
The latest example came Friday, when Mr. Bush met in the Oval Office with North Korean defectors and family members of Japanese who have been abducted by the North. "I have just had one of the most moving meetings since I've been the President," he said. On his lapel was a ribbon-shaped blue pin, the trademark of Japanese families whose loved ones are missing in North Korea.
The plight of the kidnapped Japanese hasn't received a lot of attention outside Japan, where it is a huge political issue and one reason the government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has been so supportive of the Bush Administration's insistence that Pyongyang abandon its nuclear ambitions. North Korea has admitted to abducting 13 Japanese. In recent years it has permitted five to return home, claiming that the rest are dead. The Japanese were snatched for the purpose of helping North Korean spies perfect their Japanese language skills.
Among the missing is Megumi Yokota, who was 13 years old when she was kidnapped in 1977 on her way home from school in the western seaport city of Niigata. North Korea claims Megumi is dead and in 2004 gave Japan an urn that it said contained her ashes, an assertion that scientific analysis determined was false. Among the people Mr. Bush met with Friday was Megumi's mother, Sakie.
Every Japanese knows Megumi's story, just as every South Korean knows stories of individual Koreans who have suffered or died at the hands of the North's totalitarian regime. Many South Koreans have family members in the North whom they haven't seen in a half century.
One of the great moral travesties of our time is the public silence of successive South Korean governments about the human-rights abuses of the North. President Roh and the people who work for him should be leading the campaign to educate the world about what is happening to their fellow Koreans -- not denouncing those who do.
