Breaking the Ice: a Mediating Role for Europe

Submitted by EAHRNK on Sat, 06/01/2013 - 20:13

Whenever the media informs us about North Korea’s position in the international community, we regularly hear terms like “the hermit kingdom”, “the most isolated nation in the world”, and “the secretive Stalinist bulwark”. China is often mentioned as “North Korea’s last remaining major ally”, and is either attributed with significant or negligible leverage over North Korea. Most engagement between the United Nations and North Korea takes place in the form of UN sanctions being enforced on Pyongyang, with North Korea calling these sanctions a violation of their sovereignty and seeing the United Nations as a U.S.-controlled hostile institution. While some of these descriptions should definitely be nuanced, the general picture of an isolated, despised, and misunderstood North Korean regime is adequate.

In the meantime, North Korea faces severe humanitarian issues. As has been stated many articles, North Korea keeps approximately 200 thousand civilians imprisoned in labor camps, where they often have to work for 16 hours a day, receiving only 100 to 200 grams of food. Two-thirds of the entire North Korean population face food shortages and one in every five children suffers from stunted growth due to malnourishment. North Koreans receive very little information from outside their own country and cannot freely speak their minds because, by doing so, they could face persecution. While the international community is doing its best to isolate and punish the North Korean regime, it is often forgetting that the North Korea’s 24 million civilians are in dire need of international aid.

With aid we do not mean the distribution of food and medicine in North Korea, although even these initiatives cannot help to fully combat the North Korean food shortages. This is rather about an attempt to engage with the North Korean population and to reach out to those millions of North Koreans that live in a troubled country that they did not choose to be trapped in.

We see a future for Europe and European diplomats in this respect. The U.S., China, South Korea, Russia, China, and the United Nations (led by a South Korean) are too much involved in the sanctioning process or have such strong alliances with either North or South Korea that makes it impossible for them to play a neutral role on the Korean peninsula. Therefore, we see an opportunity for Europe, which has a much more neutral position with regard to North Korea, to positively engage with the North Korean population.

So what should this engagement look like? Europe should try to form a unified and consistent approach towards North Korea. The European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea has outlined below some basic strategies which could be a start to improve the lot of the North Korean people:

  • Access to independent outside information to inform the North Korean people is crucial for change in North Korea. Europe should support initiatives which can provide the North Korean population with outside information. Examples of these are the already existing radio and television broadcasts with signals sent over the North Korean border, such as Radio Free Asia. Europe should also support organizations that send balloons with USB-sticks, DVD’s, and pamphlets over the North Korean border as well as supporting those organisations that help in the smuggling of such items over the Chinese border. Foreign USB-sticks and DVDs are now the major sources of outside information for the North Korean people. It would also help for the BBC to set up a Korean language service.

  • Give more attention to North Korean refugees and make them the face of North Korean society. Grant those refugees a stage on which they can tell their personal tales and where they can inform us of the humanitarian situation in North Korea. Refugees are a major source of information about life in North Korean and this source should be cherished. The often horrible and emotional stories of North Korean refugees can and should be used to draw more public attention to people in North Korea still suffering from hunger, malnourishment, oppression, torture, and forced labor. Only then can we seriously address the humanitarian situation in North Korea.

  • There has been a limited number of economic and cultural exchange programs with North Korea, such as those hosted by Choson Exchange, the Pyongyang Project, and the Canadian University of British Columbia. These exchange programs bring North Koreans into contact with foreign cultures, people, and economic and political systems, and can show North Korea what the benefits of an alternative political, economic, and diplomatic strategy can be. Europe should support or even set up such exchange programs.

  • Support the jangmadang, the underground North Korean markets, where this is possible. These markets, set up by North Korean citizens who cannot survive on state provisions alone, are the closest thing to market capitalism in North Korea. It provides North Koreans with the basic necessities that the state fails to provide. Also, it teaches North Koreans the basics of a capitalist market economy, which will inevitably have to be introduced at some point in the future. As a North Korean exile recently stated: ‘The key to change lies outside the sway of the regime — in the flourishing underground economy.’

The consistent policy of punishing, isolating, and deliberately impoverishing North Korea has shown no positive results over the years. It has only led to a further non-cooperative stance by the North Korean regime and to continued hardships for the North Korean people. It has proved to be a counterproductive strategy – with the only results being that the sanctioning countries get a feeling of moral righteousness out of it – and it is time for choosing a strategy that produces results. Engaging in active diplomacy on human rights and focusing on improving the fate of the North Korean population might not solve all problems at hand, but will definitely be more beneficial for the North Korean people than the current dead-end path.

 

This article was written for EAHRNK. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of our organisation.