TOKYO — North Korea is embarking on a full-scale campaign to neutralize allegations of human rights atrocities, apparently alarmed that snowballing international pressure will lead its top officials — including Kim Jong Un — to be charged with crimes against humanity.
The campaign comes as a United Nations human rights officer is set to release a report Tuesday strongly urging the U.N. Security Council to refer the regime to the International Criminal Court.
Having long refused to even enter a room if human rights were on the agenda, North Korean diplomats and propagandists, with their trademark colorful language, are now actively engaging critics.
But supporters of the growing movement to hold North Korea to account for its well-documented human rights violations call the efforts another exercise in deceit.
“They’re trying to wage this war because they are so afraid that they will be referred to the International Criminal Court,” said Joanna Hosaniak of the
Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, a Seoul-based nongovernmental organization. “It’s a total hoax.”
In its latest attempt to intimidate defectors who criticize the North Korean regime, Pyongyang released a
character assassination video Tuesday titled “Lie and Truth” in which the father of Shin Dong-hyuk says his son’s testimony is false.
Shin — who was born in a prison camp and lived a life of starvation, hard labor and torture until his escape at age 22 — has become one of the most prominent critics of North Korea.
In the
video, a man identified as Shin’s father urges Shin to “come to your senses and return to the embrace of the [Workers’] Party.”
“The dictator is holding my father hostage,” Shin wrote on
his Facebook page Tuesday, confirming that the man was indeed his father, whom he assumed was dead. “No matter what the dictator does to my father, they cannot cover my eyes; no matter what the dictator does, they can not cover up my mouth,” he wrote.
This comes after North Korean officials very obviously videotaped the testimony of two defectors at a
U.N. panel on North Korea’s human rights abuses that convened in New York last week.
Kim Song, a North Korean delegate to the United Nations, appeared at the hearing and called the allegations a product of “political conspiracy of the United States and hostile forces in their attempt to overthrow our political and social system.”
But that the North Korean regime is even attending events about its human rights record is noteworthy.
Pyongyang has traditionally refused to talk about human rights, threatening to walk out of nuclear negotiations if the issue was raised.
Now, having denied entry to human rights investigators for decades, North Korean officials this week invited Marzuki Darusman, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on North Korean human rights, to visit the country. Darusman intends to issue a report in New York on Tuesday recommending that Pyongyang officials be referred to the International Criminal Court.
Another North Korean official caused surprise at a U.N. briefing earlier this month when he admitted to the practice of “reform through labor detention camps,” although what he described was a long way from the brutal gulags depicted by escapees such as Shin.
Engaging on questions of human rights, even bombastically, appears to be North Korea’s way of trying to tackle the growing chorus of voices calling for its leaders to be put on trial for crimes against humanity.
The turning point was a 372-page report released in March by a U.N.
commission of inquiry, a litany of human rights abuses that detailed brainwashing, torture, starvation and imprisonment for “crimes” such as questioning the system or trying to escape it, or secret Christianity.
Many of the details are gruesome. One witness recalled watching a woman, held in a detention center in North Korea after being repatriated from China, being forced by a prison guard to drown her own baby immediately after giving birth.
The calls for North Korea’s senior leaders to go before a tribunal have “shaken” them into discussion, said one Western diplomat who has dealt with Pyongyang, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They want to remove that risk.”
Analysts point out that Pyongyang’s is an isolated regime that easily becomes paranoid. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Kim Jong Il, at the time the country’s leader, reportedly went underground for two weeks, afraid that North Korea would be next.
Ahn Myong-chol, a former North Korean prison guard who defected to the South and has become an outspoken detractor, agreed that the difference now is that the blame is being laid at the top.
“For the first time, the resolution demands punishment of the dictators and North Korea is responding to this because when its leader Kim Jong Un becomes the target, it has to respond,” Ahn said.
“The international community must keep pushing North Korea by mentioning Kim Jong Un’s name until North Korea runs out of space to stand,” he said.
Diplomats say the chances of the Security Council agreeing to refer North Korea to the ICC are slim, noting that permanent members Russia and China would have to agree not to veto such a move.
But Kim Jong Un’s regime is trying to avoid finding out the hard way whether a resolution would pass the Security Council — although stopping well short of reforming its system.
“They’ve created this big circus and are doing all these things to try to deny that any crimes have been committed in North Korea,” said Hosaniak of the Citizens’ Alliance.
Even if Darusman goes to North Korea, he “will not be able to visit places ad hoc or speak independently to people,” she said.
The Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s biggest newspaper,
reported Tuesday that the North is preparing a Potemkin prison in anticipation of foreign inspections. It is secretly moving political prisoners out of its notorious Yodok concentration camp, in the northern part of the country, to make it look like a collective farm, it reported.
“The regime is transferring the inmates one by one during the night so that their movement can’t be detected by satellites,” the Chosun Ilbo quoted an unnamed source as saying.
Yoonjung Seo in Seoul contributed to this report.
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