OPINION:
The Obama administration has one eye opened to recognize the genocide that radical Muslims are conducting against Christians in the Middle East, but the other eye remains closed to the threat that North Korea poses to the West. The North’s human rights abuses, taken together with a steady stream of nuclear threats against its Asian neighbors and the United States, signal the crisis that could soon spread beyond the Korean peninsula. Barack Obama’s shuttered-eye approach may soon be no longer tolerable.
A new report published by a Washington-based nongovernmental organization, titled “North Korea: Ch’oma-bong Restricted Area,” offers an unobstructed aerial view of a gulag region of the Hermit Kingdom by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Satellite imagery of a mountainous mining area, enclosed by a 12-mile-long security fence near the border with China, and recorded between 2006 and 2015, reveals a steady expansion of a prison camp for political prisoners. What appears to be burial mounds sprout near the mines from time to time, testimony to the consequences of hard labor that is the usual punishment for “enemies of the state,” which can include anyone.
The abuse of political prisoners is no secret. “In the political prison camps of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the inmate population has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labor, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights enforced through punishment, forced abortion and infanticide,” the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea has concluded.
The disregard for human life that drives the Communist regime in Pyongyang to abuse its own further illuminates its dream of eliminating enemies abroad, real and imagined. Today’s editions of The Washington Times includes an advertising supplement titled “North Korea’s Nuclear Threat,” which lays out in detail the reasons why that isolated nation is the most likely trigger for nuclear Armageddon. Among the contributors are U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, explaining the reasons behind the U.N. Security Council’s adoptions of sanctions on North Korea for its nuclear threats; Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, describing the international community’s imposition of the tough sanctions on Pyongyang, and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, writing about the House and Senate passage of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016.
North Korea answered the imposition of sanctions in January by conducting its 15th test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, and boasting of its ability to miniaturize a nuclear warhead that could devastate Seoul and New York. The behavior of the Hermit Kingdom puts it in a class by itself — even beyond the grim ability of the Islamic regime in Iran, which at the least negotiates, whether in good faith or not, with the international community. Where else on earth would a college boy be sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for the juvenile prank of helping himself to a banner from a Pyongyang hotel to take home as a souvenir?
When heads of state gather in Washington this week for the fourth annual Nuclear Security Summit, they should send an unmistakable message to nuclear-nation wannabes, and North Korea in particular: Nuclear weapons are not to be used as a threat to strong-arm neighbors to extract tribute. Far from a way to win international respect, the North’s behavior has further solidified a consensus that the world will be a safer place once the Kim dynasty ends — or is ended.
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