A Korean Day of Infamy

...It is simply an admonition on paper...

...Looking back on 2005, which defining event will Koreans remember, say, fifty or a hundred years from now...

...Over the past century, the record of even the world's leading nations in response to pogroms and man-made disasters in distant parts of the world has been one largely marked by denial, profession of impotence, belated regret, and only very occasionally, soul-searching and tepid action...

...That the South Korean government will not even sign such a statement of concern is, diplomatically speaking, misguided...

...Peace and stability certainly are priorities for any government...

...The opinions expressed here in no way represent the official views of the Kim Koo Foundation or the Korea Institute...

...But the extreme degree to which the North Korean state controls and abuses its citizens puts it into a category of one...

...There was one event of 1905 that all Koreans are taught never to forget: the protectorate treaty imposed on the Korean monarchy by Japan...

...The capacity for abstract sympathy can be a powerful force that impels some to alleviate the suffering of total strangers...

...The international norm that third-party nations, for the sake of social or economic "stability," keep their borders at least partially closed to foreign refugees does not apply to South Korea...

...General Assembly's action on November 17, 2005, will stand as little more than a historical footnote...

...Today, the Japanese remember the hard-won victory, the Russians the painful defeat, and the Americans the Nobel peace prize won by President Theodore Roosevelt for his efforts at the negotiations in Portsmouth, New Hampshire...

...To those seeking retribution and justice, excuses for betraying the trust of some 20 million brothers and sisters in the North in the name of "peace and stability" will simply be received as adding insult to injury...

...It is visibly and palpably real...

...to fail to stand with world public opinion on the basic rights of fellow Koreans, of one's own kin, is an abdication of the most minimal moral duty...

...That day, for the first time, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a resolution condemning the violation of human rights in North Korea...

...Even were the provisions of the constitution changed or the constitution itself abandoned, this plain fact will never change: Koreans in the North and South are one people...

...All the while, South Korea, the presumptive sole legitimate government on the Korean peninsula, with the world as its stage, chose to stand in the wings and avert its gaze...

...Yet the betrayal of November 17, 2005, is likely to be remembered in future years as a similar moment of abandonment, ineptitude, cowardice, and even collaboration with the enemy...

...vote and see it as a turning point in the effort to address the suffering of their ancestors...

...In 2005, no such jarring foreign encroachment or concession has been visited upon the Korean people...

...For the Koreans, Japan's status as a "protector" and its uncontested control of Korea's external relations meant the loss of national sovereignty until Japan's defeat in World War II...

...Such extreme crimes demand a response, surely, from fellow Koreans who live in the incomparably freer and wealthier South...

...Predictably, North Korea vehemently denounced the resolution, calling it a "political ploy" by the United States to topple its government, although it was actually the European Union that spearheaded the unprecedented General Assembly action...

...duress, on November 17, 1905...

...Koreans free and proud will finally demand answers about the current South Korean government's presumptions and priorities when it comes to human rights abuses in the North...

...Eighty-four nations stood on the side of principle and voted to condemn the Pyongyang regime's "widespread human rights violations, including torture, public executions, arbitrary detention, the absence of due process, the imposition of the death penalty for political reasons, the large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labor...

...Further, it is a fact that no government ever achieves within its own borders or effectively preaches to other states an absolute and unblemished respect for human rights...

...On the other hand, future generations of Koreans, one day living under a unified democratic government, will look back to the U.N...

...Yet on November 17, 2005, coincidentally one hundred years to the day since the signing of the protectorate treaty, another shameful event took place...

...Awash in frequent and stupendous scandals, Koreans rarely find the time to step back and take the long view...

...The Koreans have yet to forgive or forget them...

...More frankly, it is collaborationist...

...The scene this time was far removed from Korean soil, and the immediate impact was anything but as cataclysmic as in 1905...

...But the suffering of North Koreans is no abstraction...

...In the aftermath of Japan's stunning victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, the great powers recognized that Japan possessed in Korea—as it was said in the Portsmouth Peace Treaty that formally brought the war to an end—"paramount political, military and economical interests...

...It is also an accepted norm in international relations that nation-states do not, at the risk of compromising internal stability, readily open their borders to foreign refugees in need of humanitarian assistance...

...To lag behind world standards in nuclear technology or biological research is no shame at all...

...And North Korea found a sympathetic crowd in the 22 nations that voted against the resolution— among them, Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, Laos, Libya, Russia, Sudan, Syria, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe...

...Governments purportedly make policy decisions in the interest of their own people and the future of the nation they represent...

...Unable to defend itself, and with no foreign power interested in challenging Japan's claim, Korea signed the protectorate treaty under Sung-Yoon Lee is Kim Koo Research Associate at the Korea Institute, Harvard University...

...Like the shameful events of 1905, it will not soon be forgotten...

...Sadly, the attitude that the South Korean government exhibits toward North Korean human rights stops at just that—as abstract or rhetorical sympathy...

...Never a laggard when it comes to stressing common ethnic ties with the people of the North, South Korea nonetheless joined the 62 apathetic or fence-straddling nations—the likes of Algeria, Angola, Botswana, Cameroon, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Togo, Yemen, and Zambia— and abstained...

...And the abstention by the South Korean government on that day, if not the details of the resolution itself, will cast a long shadow...

...The South Korean government explained its inaction as being "for the sake of more urgent and important policy goals integral to peace and stability on the Korean peninsula," further elaborating that it "could only pursue efforts at improvement of North Korean human rights based on various hierarchies of priorities and harmony within the general framework of [its] North Korea policy...

...For the world beyond the Korean peninsula, the U.N...

...The purpose of the treaty, as it was spelled out, was to "strengthen the principle of solidarity" between the two countries...

...The constitution of South Korea stipulates that North Korean refugees are South Korean citizens...

...North Korea's record of human rights violations in our day and age is truly exemplary: mass starvation and malnutrition reaching one-tenth of the population, one percent of the population wasting away in concentration camps, and another one percent of the population continuing to flee the country at the risk of imprisonment, torture, and brutal public execution...

...A hundred years ago, educated Korean men favorably disposed toward Japan collaborated with the Japanese and facilitated the transfer of Korean sovereignty to Japan, all in the name of peace and stability...

...Yet the South Korean government has steadfastly discouraged North Koreans from trying to seek a better life in the South...

...As Koreans and the world learn more about the unspeakable conditions of life in North Korea, there will come a day of reckoning...

...More than the date, or the terms of the treaty, or the events leading up to November 17, 1905, Koreans still remember the "betrayal" and abandonment by the United States and other great powers, as well as the ineptitude and cowardice of their own leaders, several of whom, as collaborators with the Japanese, have forever been branded traitors in the collective Korean psyche...

...One way to try to answer that question is to look back a hundred years...

...The General Assembly's resolution on the North Korean human rights situation demands no action of any government...