Human rights in North Korea:
Between fantasy and reality
A post-colonial view on the universality of human rights through the North Korean case
Henri BOQUIEN
June 2018
Thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in International Studies
Thesis supervisor
Mr. Michiel FOULON
LEIDEN UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF HUMANITIES MASTER OF ARTS IN INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
ABSTRACT
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s human rights record is among the worst in the world and has been globally condemned — especially by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the European Union and the United Nations. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the source of mysteries and fantasies on the international stage when it comes to the topic of human rights.
This thesis is an attempt to give a critical outlook on the situation in order to understand the major issues raised by the case of North Korean human rights. It will try show what causes this biased perception of North Korean human rights that we have in Occident by setting a theoretical framework, giving an overview of the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and analysing some of the main sources used to deal with human rights in North Korea.
This study will conclude by saying that human rights in North Korea are indeed unique in many aspects and that they are not to be taken lightly. But the view that Occidental countries have on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is twisted by a Western perspective that is the source of many fantasies and approximations regarding this country. Finally, we will see that the North Korean case echoes to a much broader problem in the international community.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I became passionate about the Korean Peninsula and its history in 2014 after spending a year in Seoul as an exchange student. The topic of this thesis came to me after following Mrs. Breuker’s course ‘Human Rights in North Korea’ at Leiden University which deepened my interest toward North Korea and made me question the notion of human rights.
I thank my parents, my brother, my sister, my grandmother, Siyoon, Chris, Virginie, Joseph and Léandre for their support during the writing of this thesis. I am grateful towards my professors at Leiden University: Mr. Black, Mrs. O’Malley, Mrs. Manchanda and Mrs. Breuker for their teachings and Mr. Michiel Foulon for his supervision and precious advice.
Henri BOQUIEN June 2018
LIST OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I – INTRODUCTION ... 6
CHAPTER II – LITERATURE REVIEW ... 8
CHAPTER III – METHODOLOGY ... 13
CHAPTER IV – HUMAN RIGHTS AND NORTH KOREA: THE UNIVERSALITY OF HUMAN RIGHTS THROUGH A POST-COLONIALIST APPROACH ... 15
CHAPTER V – THE SITUATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN NORTH KOREA ... 19
CHAPTER VI – NORTH KOREAN HUMAN RIGHTS IN WESTERN MEDIAS: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ... 22
ABBREVIATIONS
CIRT Critical International Relations Theory
DPRK Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
HR Human Rights
HRW Human Rights Watch
IR International Relations
KINU Korean Institute for National Unification
NK North Korea
OHCHR Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
UDHR Universal Declaration of Human Rights
UNOCHA United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
UN United Nations
CHAPTER I – INTRODUCTION
Human rights as we know them today are embodied by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on December 10th, 1948. The United Nations Office of the
High Commissioner for Human Rights defines human rights as follows:
“Human Rights are rights inherent to all human beings, whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status. We are all equally entitled to our human rights without discrimination. These rights are all interrelated, interdependent and indivisible.”1
Human rights cover a wide variety of fields. They are often classified as civil and political rights, such as the right to life, equality before the law and freedom of expression; economic, social and cultural rights, such as the rights to work, social security and education, or collective rights, such as the rights to development and self-determination, are indivisible, interrelated and interdependent2.
The UDHR was indeed drafted by representatives from all around the world, but it is very much influenced by a Western conception of human rights. The history of this Western conception goes back way before 1948. Song3 tells us that this evolution is divided into two periods from the 11th to the 13th century and from the 17th century. She gives the essential formative influences that forged the Western ideas of HR: the role of Christianity and its influence on understanding natural law and HR; the emphasis on individuals’ rights and property rights after the 14th century with authors
like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and the Western tradition of human right of being developed by people for their mutual benefit and not being derived from a higher guiding principle.
This Western conception of human rights embodied by the UDHR shows very uneven results according to the countries. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (henceforth DPRK4)’s human rights record is among the worst in the world5 and has been globally condemned — especially by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the European Union and the United Nations. The DPRK is indeed the source of mysteries and fantasies on the international stage, especially when it comes to the topic of human rights. This thesis will investigate the perception of human rights in North Korea in the West. Here, ‘West’ and ‘Occident’ must be understood from a post-colonial perspective: former colonial powers in Europe and North America. This thesis will then not directly deal with the current nuclear issue, nor will it take any party on how to deal with the North Korean regime, nor will it take into
1
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 2017, United Nations, accessed May 2017, <http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Pages/WhatareHumanRights.aspx>
2
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 2017, United Nations, accessed May 2017, <http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Pages/WhatareHumanRights.aspx>
3Song J-Y. (2011) Human Rights Discourse in North Korea: Post-Colonial, Marxist and Confucian Perspectives.
Routledge Advances in Korean Studies. Routledge: London & New York. pp. 13-51
4In this work, the terms “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” or “DPRK” and “North Korea” or “NK” will be
used indistinctively to refer to this country
5
considerations the recent meetings with South Korean President Moon Jae-In or USA President Donald Trump as these events are too recent to be objectively dealt with and their outcome is, at the moment where these words are written, still unknown.
Much has been written on North Korea and on the situation of its human rights. As far as I know, we still lack an analysis of how the West perceives the situation of human rights in North Korea, why does it perceive it have a tendency to fantasise them and what it implies. Hence, this thesis will first draw on a post-colonial perspective on human rights to analyse the situation through primary sources such as NGO and international organisations reports as well as North Korean defectors’ testimonies to lead to a discourse analysis of a selection of Occidental medias that will help understanding the how and why the situation of Human Rights in North Korea is perceived the way it is. I will show what causes this biased perception of North Korean human rights that is present in the West by setting a theoretical framework, giving an overview of the situation of human rights in the DPRK and finally link it with how this situation is depicted in a set of selected influential Western medias through a discourse analysis.
In the first section, I will take a post-colonial lens to raise the problems of ‘universal’ Western human rights. I will then question the universality of human rights, a notion that is very much West-oriented, to try to see if human rights as they are known in the West are applicable everywhere and more particularly in the DPRK.
In the second section, I will try to give a critical overview of the situation of human rights in North Korea with the data that is available such as UN reports, testimonies, scholars’ analysis and national reports on North Korea. I will show that the available data, like the UN reports, for example, give some problems such as the relevance of sources and I will also question the credibility of refugees’ testimonies to show what issues they underpin and how this can contribute to fantasising the Occidental perception of human rights in North Korea.
In the last section, I will make a discourse analysis on how some selected influential Western media outlets (The New York Times online and The BBC online) address the topic of human rights in North Korea. I will not deal with academic discourse or political discourse. I will show that media reports on North Korea are often under informed, sensationalist and that more is known about the DPRK than it is commonly thought. I will explain how discourses on North Korea are shaped by a biased Western perspective and how this contributes to fantasising the Occidental perception of human rights in North Korea.
I will conclude this paper by saying that human rights in North Korea are indeed unique in many aspects and that they are not to be taken lightly. However, the view that we have on human rights in the DPRK is twisted by a Western perspective that is the source of many fantasies and approximations regarding this country. We will also see that the North Korean case echoes to a much broader problem in the international community.
CHAPTER II – LITERATURE REVIEW
When engaging with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, it is crucial to take into account that a lot remains unknown about this country. Despite the fact that there are substantial gaps in the knowledge, a lot has been written about North Korea. In order to attempt to unveil the fantasy of human rights in North Korea, it is essential that the fields in which there is actual information are recognised. For instance, there is a fair amount of knowledge on social and economic rights, while political and civic rights remain a grey area. Hard facts about North Korea are available and sometimes contradict not only the common knowledge but also published researches. This means that prudence is needed. Coverage could be biased, coloured, incorrect or subject to speculations and assumptions of worst-case scenarios. So-called facts are sometimes not scientifically proved nor substantiated by an adapted methodology. The gap of knowledge caused by the lack of transparency of the North Korean government could be interpreted in different ways and is partly filled with concerns speculations and worst-case scenarios, but also with sometimes idle analysis, ethically incorrect stereotypes and sensationalist information which will be further discussed all along this research.
This research was divided into several steps. First of all, I started to search for historical facts about the North Korean regime since the end of the Korean War in 1953 and the implementation of the Kim Dynasty through authors like Song6 and Breuker7. Song, for example, explains what the Juche Ideology is and where it comes
from and how it was twisted by the Kim dynasty.I quickly figured that in order to get a thorough understanding of the history of the Korean peninsula, it is crucial to have some deeper knowledge about the two Koreas and their cultural heritage.
When it comes to North Korea, one of the first questions that is raised is the question of human rights. They indeed lead to a number of fantasies and exaggerations from which it is sometimes hard to get rid of. Hence, the need for primary sources on the situation of human rights in North Korea is essential. Many countries and international organisations write yearly reports on the situation of human rights in North Korea: South Korea through their White Papers, but also organisations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders or the UN. These were the first sources I obviously had to go through. The UN report produced by the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK aims at documenting in a truthful and complete fashion the violations of human rights perpetuated by the DPRK in order to establish accountability for them, especially when they amount to crimes against humanity (p.5, I:1). This report has to be read critically as it relies mainly on personal accounts of
6Song J-Y. (2011) Human Rights Discourse in North Korea: Post-Colonial, Marxist and Confucian Perspectives.
Routledge Advances in Korean Studies. Routledge: London & New York.
7
Breuker, R.E. (2010) Confucianism and modernization in Korean history. Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 10: 254-256.
deserters and escapees from the DPRK, who may resent the government of North Korea for inflicting sufferance and loss on them, and at the same time who may feel the need to amplify their accounts to gather attention. In a similar fashion, the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) publishes a White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea every year. For instance, the 2015 White Paper has a comprehensive structure, in which it describes the International regulations as coined by the United Nations, then discusses the North Korean domestic laws, and finally presents “the reality” of the situation. This is one of the first points of contention in this paper. It does offer a fairly comprehensive overview of the North Korean side of the issue (e.g. North Korean law and how it is implemented), and it does try to stipulate situations where there has been improvement (e.g. medicine (304) and food shortage (273), treatment of handicapped people (406-408). However, phrases like “the following table shows the truth […]” (263) are used, regardless of the fact that in several points within the text KINU acknowledges its lack of information. Conclusions are drawn away (140, 160) and claims are made without proper sourcing (e.g. p.56, 199, 217). These are biased claims which make the research methodology questionable. Nevertheless, these primary sources quickly showed some important issues (that will be discussed more thoroughly in Chapters V and VI). Among the different actors that deal with North Korean human rights are NGOs. In his article “South Korean Civil Society Organizations, Human Rights Norms and North Korea”8,
Moon describes South Korean humanitarian and human rights NGOs and the influence that they have on South Korean policymaking as well as the impact that they have on the population’s view towards human rights in North Korea. He starts by explaining what NGOs are and what their role is and then focuses more particularly on the aforementioned distinction between NGOs. His paper is then clearly divided into several chronological parts corresponding to the different normative approaches taken by South Korean NGOs on North Korean human rights. This remains quite descriptive, without a clear critical perspective and with little in-depth analysis. For instance, in the explanation of the framework Moon mentions after other scholarly work, how NGOs are “significant
independent political actors rather than passive agents of the state” (p. 67). However,
when the Lee Myung-Bak administration suspended food aid, humanitarian NGOs kept quiet because they were funded by the government which made them dependent on the state (p.83-4). Here we see a clear contradiction with the earlier mentioned independence. If these NGOs rely financially on state funding, they cannot carry out their own agendas (i.e. supplying humanitarian aid to North Korea) if the government is not willing to finance the costs. There is also a lack of sourcing or incorrect sourcing. For example, page 77 provides the difference in advocacy between the different NGOs while not one presumed stance of these NGOs is properly sourced. For Table 1. South Korean Humanitarian and Human Rights NGOs, 1995-1999 (p. 70), the source is as follows:
8Moon, K-Y. (2014) South Korean Civil Society Organizations, Human Rights Norms, and North Korea. Critical
“Various email newsletters of Sarangbang Group for Human Rights 1996, 1997a, 1997b” (p. 70). This makes one wonder where the statistics for the year 1998 and 1999 came from. Also, Moon states an increase from 1995 to 1997, 91 to 112 humanitarian NGOs, while for 1996 there are 69 NGOs. This is a drop which remains unexplained, same for the drop in humanitarian NGOs from 94 in 1998 to 24 in 1999. However, it does make a historically interesting description of the role of South Korean NGOs in changing the government’s aid policies towards North Korea.
Another widely used source of information used by these countries and organisations is North Korean defectors’ testimonies. In the last decade, there has been a significant growth in the number of North Korean defector memoirs. Gauthier demonstrates the importance of these testimonies. His main objective is to show “how
defector memoirs have sought to influence the foreign perception of North Korea and to encourage readers to recognize the agency of a growing number of vocal North Koreans who are playing an important role in reminding the global community about the humanity of the North Korean people.”9 He divided North Korean defector memoirs into three categories: prison/labour camp works, works about North Korean families and famine, and lastly memoirs of privileged North Koreans. He summarises the main works on these themes, such as The Aquariums of Pyongyang, Escape from Camp 14, The Girl
with seven Names and Dear Leader. Gauthier stresses the importance of these testimonies
because they managed to reveal that North Korea is more than only a hostile and mysterious country. He argues that this collective work of testimonies represents the soft power of North Koreans to shape the international perceptions of the DPRK. But these testimonies also show some biases and relevance issues as we will discuss in Chapter V and VI.
Several authors have also written about this specific topic of human rights in North Korea. Roberta Cohen, in her article “Human Rights in North Korea – Addressing
the Challenges” (2013), aims to counter the notion that a human rights framework is
unlikely to change the behaviour of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Therefore, she offers several suggestions to the international community in dealing with the DPRK based on the process of United Nations Human Rights report. Her main argument is that the appalling human rights situation in the DPRK asks for international intervention through a broad range of acts, relying on the international human rights standards (31). Although Cohen builds a strong argument based on the objective of her article, some of the claims that she makes are not very well grounded. Most of her article relies on newspaper articles without clearly questioning the position of the newspapers or authors. In general, the tone of the article is very political. This, however, is not strange, since Roberta Cohen is specialised in human rights, humanitarian issues, and refugee issues, and was co-chair of the committee for human rights in North Korea. This illustrates what is one of the main issues with works on North Korea: a problem of the relevance of the sources. In her article Crimes against Humanity? Unpacking the North
Korean Human Rights Debate, Smith asserts that the regime of North Korea can be
9Gauthier, B. K. (2015) Hope by Itself is Not Enough: The Soft Power of North Korean Defectors, Journal of East
considered as authoritarian10. This, together with the absence of transparency of the state
causes legitimate political and ethical concerns when it comes to unknown human rights issues. She argues for “reframing North Korean human rights issues on the basis that
North Korean society is neither unique or unknowable” (2014, 127). She does make here
a very interesting point that will be further discussed throughout this paper.
To better understand this notion of ‘human rights’ and how it is applied in North Korea, I needed a strong theoretical framework to question the notion of human rights and their ‘universalism’. This is where I started to look for authors tackling these questions of human rights and universalism. I read the works of Achebe11, Buzan, Vukovich, Fanon, Pahuja and Said that convinced me to use Post-Colonialism as a theoretical framework for this study. Said set the very origins of Post-Colonialism through his vision of Orientalism. Said’s Orientalism is about how the ‘West’ is critiquing the ways in which it approaches the rest of the world. He uses a humanistic critique and emphasises the role of people instead of emphasising the role of the states. He is encouraging to think far more broadly; he wants to stop this sequence of labelling and this belligerent collective identity, he calls for an intellectual change in the ways in which the structure of international politics has been interpreted and understood up until this point. He wants to emancipate the voices that have been missing in IR through dropping these labels of self vs. other. Hobson critiques this by arguing that a lot of the problems which we have also encountered so far with CIRT and also with post-modernism, is that they call for the emancipation of voices, but they very rarely offer real means to incorporate these actors in CIRT discourses12. However, Said describes this as
features of Orientalism. Fanon talks about identity formation that is a central concept at the heart of discourse analysis and post-colonial discourse. He discusses the ‘duality and
oppositional nature of identity formation’13. What he calls for is that the post-colonial subjects of the world try to recover their inherent identity that has been squeezed out of them by a press of colonial and imperial regimes which echoes to the situation of North Korea after decades of Japanese colonisation followed by a deadly war opposing the USSR and the US on the Korean soil. But it also implies that there is a duality in the way in which they create their identity. Thereby, it is always in opposition to the pervading discourses, it is always of what they do not have as opposed to what they have, and we see that represented clearly when we think about Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”. Fanon goes deeper though, he is not simply saying that the value of post-colonial discourse is in recovering and identifying the duality and oppositional nature of those identities, it is also about how power is manifested in forms of narratives and identities and that this is reproduced in post-colonial African states. Fanon and Achebe write about it from the African perspective because a lot of post-colonial scholars draw on the historical context of Africans making these ideas. But that does not mean that it is not representative of
10
Smith, H. (2014) Crimes against humanity? Unpacking the North Korean Human Rights Debate, Critical Asian Studies 46.1, p132
11
Achebe, C. (2006) Things Fall Apart. London: Penguin
12
Hobson J.M. (2007) Is critical theory always for the white West and for Western imperialism? Beyond Westphalian
towards a post-racist critical IR. Review of International Studies, 33: 91-116
13
other post-colonial societies in other places. Vukovich goes further into a new perspective on Orientalism. He argues that there is a re-constitution of Said’s orientalism opposing East and West to a ‘sameness’ where China becomes – from a Western perspective – the same as the West. According to him, no matter how different China is, it will and must inevitably become like the West and more particularly like the US14. Moreover, this is an interesting view as it very much relates to North Korea where Western states seem to want to push other states like North Korea to become like them through the threat of economic sanctions, or, in some extreme cases, through military interventions or as Vukovich puts it: “a so-called ‘civilizing mission”’ if they do not comply with what the international community tells them to do. In his 2002 State of the Union address15, U.S. President George W. Bush included North Korea in his ‘Axis of Evil’, governments that, according to him sponsored terrorism and sought weapons of mass destruction. This post-colonial discourse reflects to the binary opposition described by Said of ‘good’ vs ‘evil’ or ‘power’ vs ‘neo-colonial’ and is well illustrated by the French-British intervention in Libya led by former French President Nicolas Sarkozy that was held to remove the Libyan dictator Muhammar Kadhafi and that was justified at the time by unverified facts as explained by founder and former president of the French NGO ‘Doctors Without Borders’ Rony Brauman16 but that were, in 2011, well accepted by the public opinion.
This helps to understand how discourse (whether it is from a state, medias, or both) can influence public opinion and hence, reproduce neo-colonial or power relations between states.
This approach of human rights in North Korea from a post-colonial perspective is important as it allows us to better understand the situation of human rights in the DPRK, of course, but also because it allows us to broaden this view and to question the notion of universality itself and to point out some possible approaches and solutions to the issues raised by this case with the question of the sources used to depict a certain situation and what problem is causes.
Yet, Post-colonialism is not flawless. It often makes do with the everlasting binary opposition between the ‘West’ and the ‘Other’ through processes of moralisation and mystification. In many cases, Post-colonialism is more destructive than constructive: it critics and denounces the ‘West’ and its actions, its worldwide influence, without bringing any solutions to the table. To avoid this, I tried to give an objective and constructive critique of the situation of human rights in North Korea by giving both sides of the coin: what is good and what is not good but also by bringing some food for thought on the notion of human rights itself and its universality.
14
Vukovich, D.F. (2005) Sinological-orientalism: The Production of the Post-Mao China. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
15
The White House, 2002, accessed on October 2017 <https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html>
16 Interview of Rony Brauman in ‘L’Obs’, accessed in April 2018 (in French):
https://www.nouvelobs.com/monde/20180329.OBS4388/pourquoi-sarkozy-est-il-intervenu-en-libye-la-notion-de-guerre-privee-traverse-l-esprit.html
CHAPTER III – METHODOLOGY
This thesis aims to depict the issue of human rights in North Korea from a double perspective: first, the question of the interpretation of human rights as a universal value and second the problem of the sources used to discuss about human rights in the DPRK and how these combined can lead to a fantasised and biased perception of North Korean human rights but also on the country and its population. I will show in the end that this is what causes the biased perception of human rights as they are seen in the ‘West’. In order to understand what causes this biased perception, I will use a Post-Colonial theoretical framework to help us question the universality of the notion of human rights and how discourse is also shaped to influence this perception of human rights. This questioning of the universalism of human rights paves the way to the second major issue with North Korean human rights: the question of the sources used to analyse them.
Setting a clear theoretical framework and methodology is crucial to understand the ins and outs of the complex situation of HR in the DPRK. The situation of HR in North Korea is an uncanny situation, but it also raises a number of fantasies due to a lack of transparency from the North Korean government. This case of the North Korean HR gives the opportunity to question the notion of HR and more specifically that of their universality.
In order to do so, I will start off by using Post-colonialism as a method and as a theoretical approach. Post-colonialism encourages an engagement with a historical rather than an ahistorical context of these discourses about the state, self-another and identity but also crucially about resistance and this is what North Korea seems to be doing: resisting the hegemonic powers in place to pursue their own agenda regardless of international pressure. Dirlik argues that discourse is a practice embedded in a historical and cultural context17. Therefore, the implication is that in a colonial context, discourse is controlled by the colonial power. Moreover, post-colonialism is all about resisting that colonial or imperial discourse and trying to create methods of challenging those ideas and methods of forwarding that resistance and this is what, in a sense, the DPRK is trying to do by opposing and challenging the international community and more specifically the US, their historical enemy since the Korean War (1950-1953) despite a direct colonial link between these two countries. Indeed, there is no ‘official’ colonial relations anymore, but the discourses from some countries such as the US or France towards other countries such as Libya or Syria but also North Korea for example, still sound very much like such a colonial relation, dominant vs. dominated, or good vs evil relation does exist. Hence the importance of post-colonialism in shaping the link between discourse, knowledge and power. This analysis gives us a framework to question the universality of human rights and how Western societies seek to apply them universally, regardless of local specificities, and in this case: in North Korea.
17Dirlik, A. (1994) The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism. Critical Inquiry,
After explaining the issue of the universality of HR and its correlation with the case of North Korea, I will analyse the current situation and the discourses surrounding human rights in the DPRK by looking into some of the various state and non-state actors that contribute to the discourses: the UN report of the Commission of Inquiry, the 2015 White Paper on North Korea and the 2014 Human Rights’ Watch Country Summary. These reports are relevant examples of some of the problems raised by the collection of data on HR in the DPRK. And lastly and importantly, I analyse the speeches of victims of human rights abuses in North Korea through their testimonies by taking one of the most famous testimonies by North Korean defectors: Escape from Camp 14 by Shin Dong-Hyuk. We will see in this section what makes the North Korean such a special case worthy of interest and what are the findings on North Korean human rights.
Lastly, the final section will be dedicated to an analysis of the discourses regarding human rights in the DPRK in Western medias. The media outlets used in this section are exclusively online because of their rapid growth in popularity over the past decade, especially among people between 18 and 59 years-old in the US, for example18. The outlets used in this section were selected based on two searches: one analysing the most quoted news outlets on Google News19 and another one focusing on the most popular
news outlets in the United States conducted by the Pew Research Center20. I will analyse articles from BBC News and The New York Times in order to cover the point of view of different Western countries. The articles were published between January 1st, 2017 and June 30th, 2017 in order to reflect a recent image of human rights in the DPRK as it is depicted in these medias outlets but also to fit the format of this thesis. The research was conducted with the use of the following keywords: North Korea, DPRK and human
rights. These simple keywords allow to get the widest number of articles related to North
Korea but also led to a more important selection and sorting of the relevant articles as they were obviously not all related to human rights in North Korea. This analysis of the discourse of this set of media outlets is of major importance: medias are the main source of information of populations and hence they have a power of influence over them, whether this power is used to fulfil a political agenda or not. Therefore, medias discourses will have an impact on the perception of people on human rights in North Korea. And this can be an even more serious issue if the sources used by these medias are controversial as discussed in Chapter V.
18The Pew Media Center 2017, accessed on July 15th <http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/>
19
The New York Times 2017, accessed June 30th 2017
<https://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/a-note-to-our-readers-on-the-times-pay-model-and-the-economics-of-reporting/?scp=2&sq=nate%20silver&st=cse>
20The Pew Media Center 2017, accessed on July 15th 2017
CHAPTER IV – HUMAN RIGHTS AND NORTH KOREA: THE
UNIVERSALITY OF HUMAN RIGHTS THROUGH A
POST-COLONIALIST APPROACH
Human Rights and Post-Colonialism
Human rights, as proclaimed by the Declaration, are supposedly universal. But we started to see that HR as we know them today are based on Western concepts and philosophies that cannot always be considered as universal values, especially when it comes to North Korea. Post-colonialism can help to tackle the question of the universality of human rights.
Post-colonialism as a method and as theoretical approach allows to open questions about identity, practice, politics and resistance. O’Malley says that: “CIRT are useful
because they allow us to escape the traditional binary opposition between North and South but also in proposing methods and ways in which we can think about these relationships differently and therefore overcome some of the problems inherent in the way we approach ‘non-Western’ countries”.21 Here, ‘non-Western’ has to be heard in the
sense of Said’s Orient22: Africa, Middle East but also East and South-East Asia.
Colonialism shaped discourses about knowledge and therefore power structures23. It is not just the creation or the insertion of a system of power, whether that is a colonial army, a police force or a colonial government, but it also shapes the representation and the content of discourses about the state, about identity, about self another within these colonies. Thus, discourse is a very important feature from a post-colonial perspective. Loomba argues that the production of knowledge and the strategies of representation are not just shaped but very much controlled by imperial and colonial systems24. Hence, from a post-colonial perspective, human rights, shaped by Western-ideas, can be perceived as a way to impose a Western way of thinking. This is why the DPRK is very reluctant in ratifying treaties and conventions on human rights.
Achebe describes how the life of an African tribe is deformed by a colonised context. What he advocates is that we need to “highlight the techniques and architecture used by
political actors to invent tales that then become realities”25. Hence, this is how colonialism works: it was not simply all about oppressive regimes and having control of people; it was also about spinning a different narrative of the state and of the nation. This is essential when we think about approaching the history of international studies from a post-colonial perspective because it is precisely used as a narrative for ordering and shaping history. And that is precisely what post-colonial studies try to understand: how
21O’Malley, A. (2016) Lectures on Post-colonialism at Leiden University 22
Said, E.W. (2003) Orientalism. London: Penguin. 1-4
23Loomba, A. (2005) Situating Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. In Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Abingdon:
Routledge
24
Loomba, A. (2005) Situating Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. In Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Abingdon: Routledge
25
are narratives and discourses used by specific actors in specific ways to shape and control structures of powers, representations of knowledge but also discourses about yourself and the other and about the nation and the state26. This echoes to Vukovich’s work on Sinological Orientalism. In his work, Vukovich argues that China – from a Western perspective – will become like the West and so, no matter how different China is27. This point of view echoes to the situation of the DPRK but also to that of other countries like Iran for example where Western countries like the US impose sanctions on a state to make it comply with their own perspective on human rights, nuclear issues and so forth.
Questioning the Universality of Human Rights
Pahuja28 is focusing on the question of universal rights and whether that necessarily implies that there are universal values. She starts by saying that the UDHR is by no means clear. According to her, it is not because we have a charter of rights, that there obviously is a set of universal values. For example, when it comes to the DPRK, Song29 argues that the North Korean perspective on HR has a lot in common with international ideas, but it is the individualistic and liberal Western ideas of HR that are not compatible. This is where there is a lot of debate among post-colonial scholars. Universal rights are interpreted and often read in different ways by different actors, and it is precisely those different interpretations that create questions around whether or not there is such a thing as universal values.30 Pahuja argues that international law makes nation statehood the
only available legal personality for decolonised states. This is a particular problem because nation statehood is based on those old colonial, imperial ideas of power, knowledge and discourse and it perpetuates some of those elements of colonial societies that make it difficult for post-colonial societies to precisely grasp tools of resistance that Fanon31 and Achebe32 call them to do.
Fanon and Achebe are both talking about legitimacy and universality. For them, it is all about knowledge, power and discourse, and how discourses construct systems of knowledge, which then will lead to forms and institutions of power. What Pahuja33 affirms is that new international law and institutions based their legitimacy on a claim to universality. In order to have legitimacy between law and institutions, they need to claim that there are some universal rights or a universal system to which they aspire or that they
26O’Malley, A. (2016) Lectures on Post-colonialism at Leiden University 27
Vukovich, D.F. (2005) Sinological-orientalism: The Production of the Post-Mao China. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
28
Pahuja, S. (2011) Decolonising International Law, Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 3 - From decolonisation to developmental nation state, 44-94.
29
Song J-Y. (2011) Human Rights Discourse in North Korea: Post-Colonial, Marxist and Confucian Perspectives. Routledge Advances in Korean Studies. Routledge: London & New York. 13-51
30O’Malley, A. (2016) Lectures on Post-colonialism at Leiden University 31
Fanon, F. (2001) Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. 3360 F 3
32
Achebe, C. (2006) Things Fall Apart. London: Penguin
33Pahuja, S. (2011) Decolonising International Law, Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality.
aspire to create. Thus, these two aspects interact with each other and this is where the debate gets interesting because it is not just about criticising the West and saying that there is no such thing as universal values if we look at the ways that they are interpreted in different countries; it is also thinking about how actors who are resistant towards that order engage in a debate over universality. Because in the end they are also seeking recognition from a system based on a claim to universality.
The problem with this idea is that it implies that states are rational actors, but in the case of the DPRK, the purpose of the state is sovereignty and national survival at all costs. This does not mean that the DPRK is irrational but that the objectives and behaviour of the state are different than that of other states. On the contrary, as Stephen Walt said in his June 2018 article in Foreign Policy: “The Kim family has never been
crazy or irrational; […] they’ve just managed to keep themselves in power in difficult
circumstances for seven decades”34. The growth of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal shows its will to appear as a nation capable of defending itself against any attack, to defend its sovereignty and the survival of its regime. Indeed, every kind action that has been taken against North Korea, whether economic or military, only served to increase provocations through missile tests or threats towards Japan, South Korea or the United States. This is why, when we address the topic of HR in North Korea, we try to compare Western notions and concepts that might not be applicable in the DPRK. Some actions that are defined as violations of human rights in the DPRK also exist in Western societies to a certain extent. Therefore, are Western societies also violating human rights or is it acceptable because they are mainstream democracies? As an example, the commission of inquiry on HR in the DPRK highlighted the violation of the freedom of expression in its report35 through monitored phone calls. Yet, if we look back on Western societies, in some cases of national security, governments are also allowed to monitor its citizens’ phone calls. There is a thin line between violating human rights and a case of national security: what might look like a violation of the freedom of expression from a Western perspective, might very well have other justifications for actions in North Korea whose objectives might be different from those perceived by the international community, and this is becoming more and more the case these days in a context of permanent terrorist threat: in France for example, President Macron passed a law that put some parts of the state of emergency in the ordinary law36, which means that some exceptional measures
that normally belong to a state of emergency, would be applicable anytime. Even though these human rights are perceived as obvious in Western societies, it is important to investigate what North Korea perceives as human rights to be able to measure its violations. Likewise, the definition and implementation of these democracies are based on Western perspectives, but North Korea has a different regime, culture and worldviews.
34
S.M. Walt, (2018) Never Call Kim Jung Un Crazy Again, Foreign Policy <http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/14/never-call-kim-jong-un-crazy-again/amp/ >
35Report of the detailed findings of the commission of inquiry on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic
of Korea
36Le Monde 2017, accessed on June 30th 2017
Hence, it is problematic to impose ‘universal’ regulations on a country without a deep understanding thereof.
This section started by addressing the notion of human rights through a post-colonial lens to show how human rights emerged from a Western way of thinking. In a second part, the questioning on the universality of human rights showed that claiming that there is a set of values that are universal does not make them applicable to every actor on the international stage and more specifically in our case with North Korea. We can now move to the situation of human rights in the DPRK. This next section will show what are the challenges of addressing human rights in North Korea and will give an overview of findings on this issue and what are the problems that they bring in order to try and demystify the situation.
CHAPTER V – THE SITUATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN NORTH
KOREA
The Challenges of Human Rights in North Korea
Human rights in North Korea are a mix between a continuation of Korea’s cultural and historical context and a recent Marxist legacy. They have several things in common: “a rigid social structure, collective interests over individual human rights, the
prioritisation of socio-economic rights over individual freedom and citizens’ duties before rights” (Song, 2011, 122). The Juche Ideology has been reflected in domestic
policies (Song, 2011, 122). Song shows how Kim Il-Sung and then Kim Jong-Il have succeeded in turning this ideology, which was originally ‘human-centred’ and that defined the people as ‘the master of national construction’ (Song, 2011, 142), into an ideology that turns the state into a divinity. She points out how the original ideology is different from the reality of the regime and how Kim Il-Song handled pretty well the propaganda through his ‘On-the-spot’ guidance (Song, 2011, 128), the ‘Weekly
self-criticism sessions’, or the ‘Learn from heroes’ campaigns (Song, 2011, 135).
A popular thought on human rights in North Korea is that we know absolutely nothing about them. There are, as we saw before, important gaps in the knowledge, regarding the North Korean penal system for example37 but a lot has been written about the DPRK whether it is from scholars or from international organisations and it is essential, for the fields in which there is factual information, to be recognised.
One of the first acknowledged human right that is being violated by the North Korean government in terms of politics, is the article 21 of the UDHR that states that: “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be
expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.” Indeed,
the DPRK is a hereditary dictatorship. It does have local elections and five political parties, so it is a democracy in that sense, but North Koreans often have to vote for only one person38. The 2015 White Paper39 offers a rather comprehensive overview of the North Korean side of the issue (e.g. North Korean law and how it is implemented), as well as an effort to mention situations where there has been improvement (e.g. medicine (304) and food shortage (273), or the treatment of handicapped people (406-408).
These gaps mean that we need to be careful with this matter. Coverage is often biased, coloured with stereotyped perceptions, incorrect or subject to speculations and assumptions of worst-case scenarios because of the opacity of some parts of the system.
37
Smith, H. (2014) Crimes against humanity? Unpacking the North Korean Human Rights Debate, Critical Asian Studies 46.1: 127-43
38US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Country. 2015. Report on Human Rights Practices in the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea, p.15
39
Do, K-O; Kim, S-A; Han, D-H; Lee, K-S; Hong, M. (2015) White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea. KINU: Seoul, 2015
So-called facts are often not scientifically proved nor substantiated by an adapted methodology and suffer – as Smith likes to put it – from ‘lazy analysis’. The fact that speculation, worst-case scenarios and misleading information is not uncommon, makes dealing with North Korea an extremely delicate, complex and difficult matter. Smith argues that:
“It is ethically correct to raise concerns about a lack of transparency and to pursue
vigorously the efforts by international campaigners to allow independent access to facilities. It is not ethically correct to fill the information vacuum with stereotypes, caricature, and lazy analysis” (Smith 2014, 142).
Findings on North Korean Human Rights
Breuker argues that there has been a distinct change over the last few years in terms of the issues concerning North Korea. Notably, the UN Commission of Inquiry published an extensive report in February 2014, condemning “systematic, widespread and gross
violations” in the country. Accordingly, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution
69/188 by which it transmits the COI’s report to the Security Council. The resolution also encourages the Council to consider a referral of the North Korean regime to the International Criminal Court, and also targeted sanctions on North Korea. In light of the resolution, the Security Council has decided to add the issue of human rights in North Korea to its agenda. However, still, questions remain as to whether such unprecedented attention could bring a ‘real’ change to North Korea's human rights record.40 Indeed,
every action from the international community has always pushed North Korea to further close itself and increase nuclear threats in reaction to the international community’s push for North Korea to bend the knee to their will.
North Korean human rights abuses have been recorded by UN reports, NGO reports and South Korean White Papers. These reports list the most important violations of human rights that are generally assumed to be happening in North Korea. These violations consist of repression of freedoms of speech, political opposition, independent medias or religious freedom. However, these reports suffer major issues as the cooperation with the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly is by all means non-existent, as North Korea ignores all resolutions on its human rights situation41.
Which make testimonies from North Korean defectors the main source of information regarding the violations of HR in the DPRK. For example, some of the sources used in the COI report42, especially in the sections C, D, and E of chapter IV, regarding the findings of the commission, don’t appear to be totally reliable. In particular, some claims of the commissions are based on, or at least referenced with, newspapers’ articles (see for example p. 203-4, IV, D, 664 and 667); which means that if the report uses biased sources, it is probably as biased as its own sources. If a report bases some of its claims on
40
Breuker, R. (2016) Lectures on Human Rights Discourses on North Korea at Leiden University
41
The Chosunilbo 2017, Chosun Media, accessed April 2017,
<http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/12/22/2014122201032.html>
42Report of the detailed findings of the Commission of Inquiry on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic
newspaper articles which themselves base their claims on those reports, it becomes a vicious circle of biased information.
Moreover, the commission relied extensively on the testimony of Shin Dong-Hyuk and other defectors of political prison camps in order to determine the conditions inside of these camps. However, since Shin admitted that certain aspects of his account of life in North Korea and in political prison camps at the beginning of 2015 were fictional, it may be argued that during the public hearings held by the commission of inquiry the reliability of the witnesses was not ascertained accurately. This is the main issue raised by defectors testimonies: defectors may want to seek revenge on the government of North Korea for the pain and the suffering they endured, and at the same time they may feel the need to amplify their story in order to gather attention. The other risk is trauma: when we experience a shock, especially when it is on such a long term (some defectors take a few years to reach South Korea43), the perception of reality is deformed, and it is possible to forget parts of what happened (see post-traumatic amnesia44). Hence, I believe that defectors’ testimonies can be a significant source of information when many different testimonies are gathered, but they must be handled with care, as their reliability can sometimes be questionable45.
This section showed that human rights are not as obscure as the public opinion thinks they are. There are significant gaps in the knowledge, but there are also some parts that are rather well known. The other point covered in this section is the issues raised by the findings on the DPRK’s human rights record and the problem of the relevance of the sources. The issue that this raises here is how these sources are used to create a discourse about North Korea.
The last section will show through a discourse analysis, that this lack of relevant sources on North Korean human rights is emphasised by the way Western medias address the topic of North Korea and more particularly of its human rights. It will show that these medias play a major role in influencing the perception of how human rights are in this country.
43See for example Park Yeonmi’s testimony (2015. In Order to Live. Penguin Press.) where she explains that it took
her two years to reach South Korea
44
Headway, U.K. (2008). Post-Traumatic Amnesia - Fact Sheet
45
See for example: Shin, D-H., 2012. Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to
Freedom in the West. Viking and The Guardian 2017, accessed on December 2016,
CHAPTER VI – NORTH KOREAN HUMAN RIGHTS IN WESTERN
MEDIAS: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Chapter IV started to open the debate on whether there is a universality of human rights or not. This is a major question to try and understand the situation in North Korea, but also Western perspectives on other countries and their vision on human rights. As far as this research is concerned, I believe that there is a set of universal values (the prohibition of torture for example) but that they need to be differentiated from the UDHR. As discussed before, the UDHR was made of Western concepts and is sometimes too abstract, which means that it cannot be applied blindly to all societies, and more importantly, it cannot be imposed on certain societies by other societies. This last point is crucial: as mentioned in Chapter IV, in many cases, armed interventions or “so-called
‘civilizing mission[s]”46 to push other countries to adopt human rights, to give up their
nuclear weapons or to put it simply: to comply with Western standards, are often justified in discourse, willingly or not. In the North Korean case, of course this has never led to any military intervention since the Korean War and this perspective seems to be getting less probable as of today, but it did lead to serious threats, especially coming from the United States. This section will try to analyse how discourses on human rights in North Korea are shaped in a selected set of medias.
Breuker says that having a human rights problem is one thing. The DPRK also seems to have a media problem in that reporting on the DPRK is often under informed, unaware of ‘Koreaphone’ sources and sensationalist, yet it also determines the perception on the DPRK47. When North Korea makes it to the news, it is usually about missile tests or about the strange hobbies and fascinations of the current leader. It is rare to hear anything about the ordinary lives of North Koreans. Whereas it is true that this kind of information is really hard to access, the way through which North Korea is portrayed in a lot of medias is, I believe, partly responsible for the dissemination of stereotypes, one-sided and misleading information. In this section, I will do a discourse analysis of how a selected set of some of the most used news outlets tackle the topic of North Korea over the first half of 2017 through an analysis of the lexical field and of the specific topics addressed by these outlets to try to understand what causes this biased perception that we have of North Korean human rights and more generally, of North Korea itself. I will analyse articles from BBC News and The New York Times: as explained in Chapter III these online medias represent some of the most read outlets online and are a good reflection of the perception of the DPRK by British and American medias. The scale of the discourse analysis (January 1st, 2017 to June 30th, 2017) was chosen for three main reasons: it is a fairly recent period allowing an up-to-date analysis but also it also gives us enough perspective on the situation, the presence of North Korea in the news started to grow
46
Vukovich, D.F. (2005) Sinological-orientalism: The Production of the Post-Mao China. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
47
more and more because of the nuclear issue and finally it is adapted to the format of this work as a longer period would have made the discourse analysis too long.
The BBC
Between January 1st and June 30th, 2017, the BBC has published over a hundred48
North Korea-related articles. A first point that is interesting to notice is that most of these articles are not signed. Hence, it is impossible to know whether the people who wrote these articles have any knowledge of the country or not as we will see hereafter. The main topics tackled are the nuclear weapons issue with 31 articles. This is the most recurrent topic over the past few years in media outlets but even more since the beginning of 2017 with the new turn in the DPRK’s ballistic missiles’ development. The second most recurrent topic is US-North Korea relations with 25 articles. This topic goes from plots to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un to US responses to North Korean missiles tests. Then come two other events: Otto Warmbier’s death, the American student who attempted to steal a banner in his hotel with 12 articles between April and June 2017 and the assassination of Kim Jong-Un’s brother, Kim Jong-Nam, with 10 articles. And finally, the DPRK-China relation with 8 articles, however most of these articles are also related to North Korea’s development of ballistic missiles. However, there is a minority of articles addressing different topics.
In a January 9th, 2017 article49, Joanna Jolly, BBC’s South Asia editor50, conducted an interview of Lee Sungju, a North Korean escapee. This interview is interesting as it is a very good example of the kind of problems that we often find in articles tackling the topic of North Korea and more particularly that of North Korean defectors. The first striking point is that this interview is written in a novel-like and dramatic style:
“Then suddenly Sungju's father announced he was leaving. He told his son he was
going to China to look for food, and would come back in a week with rice cakes. The week passed, but Sungju's father did not return.” or “‘My father hugged me and we cried together,’ he says. ‘I had tons of questions, but I just said, 'I've missed you dad.' He said, 'Where is your mother?' and I cried again because I didn't know.’”
This kind of formulation clearly pushes the reader to feel empathy and to make the story more dramatic and it leads to assume worst-case scenarios without being able to fact-check what is said and hence pushes to dramatize the situation regardless of the accuracy of what is being said. Then again, this interview is not a novel and the journalist should adopt a more neutral tone. There are also some spelling mistakes that show a lack of rigour: "’I was picked as a leader by my brothers because I knew how to do
Taekwando(sic),’ says Sungju.”. But apart from these issues, defectors testimonies bring a
more important problem as we discussed in the previous chapter. Indeed, these
48
BBC News 2017, accessed on July 25, 2017
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=North+Korea&filter=news&suggid=urn%3Abbc%3Aisite%3Acurated-m-o%3Anorth-korea#page=23>
49
BBC News 2017, accessed on July 25th 2017 <http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37914493>
50Harvard School of Public Health 2017, accessed on July 25th, 2017
testimonies are often taken for granted with no fact-checking possible and can sometimes have important consequences such as that of Shin Dong-Hyuk. Shin’s revision has caused a lot of doubt among the public, because many argue that due to his lie we can now never be certain whether his story is completely true or not. However, we should also take into account that Shin might not have remembered all of the events that occurred correctly because of his severe traumatic experiences. Therefore, it is important to recognise the potential biases of this kind of articles and that it needs to be read with a critical eye as they rely on personal accounts of deserters and escapees from the DPRK, who may resent the government of North Korea for inflicting sufferance and loss on them, and at the same time who may feel the need to amplify their accounts in order to gather attention.
Another BBC News article51 deals with hunger in North Korea through a 2017
UNOCHA report52. Whereas there is not much to say about the article itself as it simply
quotes facts from the report, the issue here is the report itself. In a similar fashion to the UN report by the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK, the report admits its own limitations53:
“[…] further advances are required to ensure that planning, financing and
decision-making processes are underpinned by accurate information and analysis” or “Access to up-to-date baseline data continues to pose a challenge. The last National Nutrition Survey was carried out in 2012 and the last Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission (CFSAM) was carried out in 2013, although the Government has since conducted its own crop assessment but that misses key nutritional data.”
This makes question how accurate the data used in this report can be whereas they are taken as the truth by media outlets and hence contribute to forging an inaccurate, if not fantasised, perception of human rights in North Korea.
The unsigned June 15th, 2017 BBC News article54 is a good example of how some articles can be sensationalist, stereotyped with a particular focus on Kim Jong-Un’s ‘extravagant life’. It mentions former basketball player and good friend of Kim Jong-Un, Dennis Rodman and his trip to North Korea during which he brought a ‘gift bag’ for the Supreme Leader. The article enumerates the list of ‘gifts’ brought by Rodman to Kim on a humoristic and ironical tone. The article starts by stating that Kim “reportedly lives a
hugely extravagant life, paid for with vast funds from the state coffers” without any
source. Words such as ‘hugely’ or ‘vast’ are here to emphasise this sensationalist and unsourced statement on contributing to this idea of fantasising North Korea. The article goes on with a very obscure statement when mentioning the copy of ‘Where’s Waldo?’ offered by Rodman: “could this somehow allow Mr Kim to practise for when he needs to
pick a friend out of the crowd?” followed by a photo of Kim and Rodman at a basketball
game with a crowd of North Koreans in the background all dressed in black. The author
51
BBC News 2017, accessed on July, 2017 <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39349726>
52
ReliefWeb 2017, accessed on July 25, 2017
<http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/DPRK%20Needs%20and%20Priorities%202017.pdf>
53
UN DPRK Needs and Priorities 2017 report
http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/DPRK%20Needs%20and%20Priorities%202017.pdf pp.11 &16
54
concludes by saying: “So he panicked and grabbed a couple of things at the airport -
you've never done that?”. Whereas this could be funny if it was on a blog or on a
humoristic website, I believe that this kind of article, when posted on media outlets with an audience like that of the BBC, seriously contributes to the dissemination of bad stereotypes regarding the DPRK without bringing any real knowledge on the issue.
The New York Times
As for The New York Times, when we start looking in the website’s articles database, the first words that appear next to ‘North Korea’ are the words ‘nuclear’, ‘nuclear program’ and ‘evil’. Unlike BBC News, most of the articles here are signed by their authors. The New York Times (henceforth The NYT) only has about 25 articles related to North Korea between January 1st, 2017 and June 30th, 2017: this only includes articles directly related to North Korea, not articles mentioning it (for which the result rises to 826). An interesting point in comparison with the BBC is that despite the fact that there are fewer articles, the topics are more diverse than those of the BBC.
The main topics were the captivity and death of Otto Warmbier with 4 articles, the election of Moon Jae-In, the new South Korean president, and the ordeals that he is going to face with North Korea with 3 articles. But also 3 articles about Kim Jong-Nam’s death, 3 regarding US-North Korea relations and 3 articles related to North Korean defectors. However, The NYT also gave room to other topics including one article on human rights.
In its March 24th, 2017 article55, Rick Gladstone, reporter and editor on The NYT Foreign Desk, discusses about the UNHRC resolution adopted on that day that “authorizes the use of criminal justice experts to devise legal strategies for eventual
prosecutions of violations by North Korea”. In his article, Gladstone mentions the 2014
UN report by the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK. The objective of this report is to document the violations to human rights perpetuated by the North Korean regime in order to establish accountability for them, and more particularly when it comes to crimes against humanity (p.5, I:1). However, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, even though this report states clearly its goals, limitations and findings, it poses a certain amount of problems and it has to be read critically as it relies mainly on personal accounts of deserters and escapees from the DPRK, who may resent the government of North Korea for inflicting sufferance and loss on them, and at the same time who may feel the need to amplify their accounts in order to gather attention. This is a good example of the aforementioned sources problems when it comes to human rights issues in North Korea.
Gerry Mullany’s February 15th, 2017 article56 in The NYT reports on purges
perpetuated within the North Korean administration. The article is based on a report from
55
The New York Times 2017, accessed on July 25th, 2017
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/world/asia/un-rights-council-north-korea-future-prosecution-crimes.html>
56
The New York Times 2017, accessed on November 3rd, 2017
