John Feffer is a Pantech Fellow at the Korea Studies Program at Stanford University and the author of , : U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories Press, 2003) and Shock Waves: Eastern Europe After the Revolutions (South End Press, 1992).

The Forgotten Lessons of Helsinki Human Rights and U.S.-North Korean Relations John Feffer

In the movie Lost in Translation, an aging sible detriment of both regional security Hollywood actor and a young American and the human rights of North Koreans. woman are thrown together in Tokyo. The Neoconservatives and paleo-hawks, both city is to them a bewildering, alien land- within and outside the Bush administration, scape. We see Japanese culture through have taken a one-size-fits-all approach to their eyes, and much of what they see ap- North Korea patterned on Washington’s pears grotesque or absurd. More clueless approach to the “totalitarian” societies of than ugly, these Americans are able to view the Soviet bloc. Not only are the historical Japanese culture only through the prism of circumstances different, North Korea is their own narrow experience. not like the former Soviet Union or Eastern If Japanese society can remain baffling Europe before 1989. Much is lost in transla- to educated American travelers after decades tion, and bad policy is the result. of cultural exchanges—after all the sushi restaurants, the translations of Tanizaki and The Historical Context Murakami, the fascination with Japanese The human rights movement grew out of art forms both traditional (flower arrang- the experience of the Second World War ing) and trivial (Pokemon) in the United and the Holocaust. In the postwar years, de- States—it is not surprising that the consid- veloping countries, anticipating the end of erably more remote North Korean society colonialism, demanded the creation of stan- can seem impenetrable. Yet however much dards for economic and social justice. At the our superficial view of Japan—which we same time, an incipient human rights move- tend to see in terms of timeless tradition ment began to promote the idea of universal (the elegiac) or hypermodern anomie (the human rights. Led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the comic)—is to be regretted, our relations U.N. Human Rights Commission managed with Japan are friendly. Our relations with a to reconcile these two approaches by assert- possibly nuclear-armed North Korea are not. ing a set of basic human values that tran- In this instance, the stakes are too high to scended diverse cultural contexts in the allow a simplistic vision of North Korea as Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “totalitarian” to define policy. which was approved by the U.N. General Yet it is precisely this limited interpre- Assembly in 1948.1 However, mindful of tation of North Korean society that is driv- the issue of sovereignty, the commission ing U.S. human rights policy toward North made it clear that no state could use the Korea, as revealed in the debate over the declaration to justify intervention in another North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004. state’s affairs. This legislation, which is likely to be signed Human rights became an instrument of soon, attempts to insert human rights into U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s in the con- the ongoing multilateral negotiations over text of détente with the Soviet Union. In North Korea’s nuclear program—to the pos- Washington, a group of Democrats who

The Forgotten Lessons of Helsinki 31 were liberal on social policy and hawkish on kia, KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotnikow) in foreign policy coalesced around Rep. Henry Poland, and the Moscow Helsinki Group “Scoop” Jackson. Deeply suspicious of the blazed a path that political dissidents fol- Soviet Union and opposed to détente, the lowed in the late 1980s as cracks appeared Jacksonites pushed legislation through Con- in the Soviet edifice. Human Rights Watch gress in 1974 that linked most-favored- and other human rights monitoring groups nation trade status for the Soviet Union to that were formed to gauge the progress of increased emigration levels for Soviet Jews. the Helsinki Accords soon extended their In so doing, the Jacksonites were aiming activities to other regions. more at derailing détente than at promoting The human rights movement in Asia human rights, but a precedent was nonethe- also picked up steam in the 1980s. Various less established. groups, both domestic and foreign, moni- Likewise, human rights were not at the tored the human rights situation in South top of the agenda when the Helsinki Ac- Korea, Burma, and Indonesia (including cords were signed in 1975. The accords, a East Timor). But North Korea remained a far-ranging set of agreements among 35 relative black hole. The Minnesota Lawyers countries in Europe, North America, and International Human Rights Committee the Soviet bloc, represented the high-water and Human Rights Watch/Asia did produce mark of détente. Numerous bargaining po- a book-length report on North Korea in sitions had to be accommodated at the ne- 1988. But this report, which discussed the gotiating table. The Soviets wanted their political stratification of the country and the wartime territorial gains—eastern Poland punishments visited upon those who fell and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and afoul of the system, departed from Human Lithuania—officially recognized under in- Rights Watch standards in relying on un- ternational law. Advocates of détente urged verified interviews and secondhand reports.2 an increase in East-West exchanges in trade, The authors of the report, like the U.S. science, and education. Arms controllers State Department, depended for much of aimed to achieve confidence-building mech- their information about North Korea on ad- anisms that would reduce the East-West mittedly biased, fiercely anticommunist military confrontation in the heart of Eu- South Korean sources. rope. And human rights advocates wanted What is known is that large-scale im- the Eastern bloc countries to adhere to a set prisonment and politically motivated execu- of principles guaranteeing individual rights tions were the norm during the consolida- of expression, assembly, and so on. The final tion of Kim Il Sung’s rule of North Korea in accords did include human rights provi- the late 1940s, and that in the long “cold sions, though no one in the West expected peace” that followed the Korean War, politi- the governments in Eastern Europe and the cal and individual freedoms were severely Soviet Union to pay anything but lip service curtailed. In Kim’s North Korea, built upon to the human rights protocols. the arid ground of Japanese colonial rule, The Helsinki process helped to illumi- there was no established civil society to con- nate the gap between official policy and re- tend against the imperatives of the central ality with respect to human rights. But government. There were no large, semi- more than that, it proved to be an effective autonomous institutions, like the Catholic political tool. In attempting to hold their Church in Poland, to vie for the sympathies governments to their agreements under the of the citizenry. There were no minority eth- Helsinki Final Act, dissident organizations nic groups, as with Hungarians in Romania, in Eastern Europe found a new route toward or competing nationalities, as in Yugoslavia, regime change. Charter 77 in Czechoslova- to agitate for their rights. And unlike in

32 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • FALL 2004 Eastern Europe, there were no armed upris- to travel around the country and assess so- ings, as in East Germany in 1953 or Hun- cial conditions. gary in 1956. There was no North Korean The information on the human rights “thaw” that resembled the Soviet “thaw” of situation in North Korea that emerged in the early 1960s, no Pyongyang Spring that the mid-1990s confirmed earlier reports mirrored the Prague Spring of 1968. There (by Amnesty International, Human Rights was no radical accommodation with the Watch, and the U.S. State Department) market as in Hungary or Yugoslavia in the of the existence of labor camps for approxi- 1970s and 1980s. North Korean students mately 200,000 political prisoners (kwan- exposed to the “virus of 1989” when study- li-so) and an unknown number of general ing in Eastern Europe were called home and prisoners (kyo-hwa-so), detention centers for reportedly sent to reeducation camps. returnees from China, endemic torture, Nor were there public dissidents or dis- summary executions, and widespread social sident movements in the country. No reform controls on speech, religious and artistic ex- movement within the North Korean Work- pression, and political assembly.4 ers’ Party openly challenged the traditional During the nuclear crisis of 1993–94, old guard with “new thinking.” To use the when the United States nearly went to war social scientist Albert O. Hirschman’s for- with North Korea over the latter’s pluto- mulation, North Koreans, except for the nium-processing capabilities, the issue of country’s top leaders, lacked a “voice” in the human rights was not on the agenda in the system.3 They could accede to state policy, discussions between the two countries. The keep quiet about their misgivings, or, if the heirs of Scoop Jackson, who had generally rare opportunity presented itself, leave the acquired the label “neoconservative” to dis- country. Those who managed to do so pro- tinguish them from such “balance-of-power vided the outside world with its only first- conservatives” as Henry Kissinger and Brent hand information about the human rights Scowcroft, did not have a place at the table situation within North Korea. in the Clinton administration. In focusing In the mid-1990s, when North Korea’s on security issues (with only a passing nod chronic food shortages worsened to the to economic issues), the Agreed Framework point of widespread famine, the state’s abili- followed in the tradition of the arms control ty to control the movement of the popula- treaties of the Cold War years, not the om- tion broke down. Pyongyang was forced to nibus negotiations of the Helsinki Accords. loosen its grip so that people could move The agreement was basically a horse trade— more freely about the country to find food. U.S. economic incentives in return for a As many as 200,000 North Koreans crossed pledge by North Korea to freeze its nuclear into China in search of food and/or jobs. programs. There was, however, no offer of With the increase in the flow of people out U.S. carrots for improvements in North of the country, news of what was going on Korea’s human rights record. Nor did the in North Korea was no longer restricted to Clinton administration bring up the issue a handful of defectors vetted by the South of human rights when negotiating with Korean government. (And, presumably, in- Pyongyang to freeze its missile development formation about China’s dramatic economic program in exchange for another package of progress made it back to average people in economic goodies. North Korea.) In 1996, North Korea asked However, there were those in Washing- the United Nations and other nongovern- ton and elsewhere during the Clinton ad- mental organizations for humanitarian aid. ministration who were uncomfortable with Food monitors and other international visi- the U.S. government’s approach toward tors thus had an unprecedented opportunity North Korea, which they viewed as a

The Forgotten Lessons of Helsinki 33 misguided form of détente, and they seized In 1998, the endowment sponsored a anew on the idea of linking human rights conference in Seoul on the topic of North to a more hard-line approach toward a per- Korea’s internal situation. While South Ko- ceived enemy. rean presenters offered nuanced perspectives on the changes that had been taking place Human Rights and Regime Change in North Korea as a result of the post–Cold In the late 1990s, an informal coalition of War realignment of power and the mid- actors began to advance the issue of North 1990s food crisis, NED representatives held Korean human rights in the policy realm. to a narrow view of North Korea based on One of the driving forces behind this coali- former Reagan official Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s tion was the National Endowment for famous distinction between authoritarian Democracy (NED), which had been estab- regimes, which could evolve, and totalitar- lished during the Reagan administration in ian regimes, which could not. They believed a bipartisan effort to promote democracy that human rights would never improve in and democratic institutions around the North Korea except through a change of world. During the 1980s, the endowment regime. (The absence of any discussion of funded dissident organizations in Eastern China and its evolving human rights situa- Europe and the former Soviet Union. As an tion was notable.)6 alternative to—or, in some cases, in parallel The NED’s view directly challenged the with—the covert operations of the CIA, the engagement policy of South Korean presi- NED was committed to accelerating the dent Kim Dae Jung. This policy, a spruced- centrifugal forces that were pulling apart up version of earlier attempts at Nordpolitik, multinational communist states (the Soviet foreswore absorption of the North by force Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia). Human and favored the promotion of economic, po- rights were an important wedge in this litical, and social contacts between the two campaign, for the issue afforded outside or- Koreas. Culminating in the summit in 2000 ganizations a way to skirt the issue of non- between Kim Dae Jung and North Korean intervention in the affairs of sovereign states leader Kim Jong Il, this engagement policy and push for internal change.5 led to increased trade and joint economic The NED was busy in the Clinton years projects between the two Koreas, facilitated dealing with the “transition” states that an unprecedented number of reciprocal vis- emerged from the wreckage of the Cold its between North and South Korea, and War. Though it had to fight for its existence considerably reduced the wattage of both in a memorable congressional debate in countries’ propaganda blasts. Although crit- 1993, the endowment emerged from this ics of the engagement policy charged South scrape flush with funds. New horizons beck- Korea’s president with appeasement, during oned, particularly in Asia. A cold war was this period of improved relations Seoul still being fought across the Taiwan Strait, maintained its military containment policy and Laos and Vietnam remained nominally and its high levels of military spending. Be- communist. But it was North Korea that tween 1994 and 2000, with some excep- represented the most provocative challenge tions, Seoul and Washington took a similar to the organization. Unlike in the 1980s, carrot-and-stick approach toward North however, when the NED’s support for the Korea. Nicaraguan contras found favor in the Rea- The NED nevertheless aligned itself with gan White House, the organization was now “regime change” advocates against “engage- faced with a Democratic administration ment” supporters. It funded South Korean that, as the 1990s progressed, wanted to groups that were largely dismissive of Kim make deals, not war, with North Korea. Dae Jung’s initiatives. And it maintained

34 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • FALL 2004 close links to several U.S. organizations that tion of enough pressure, and given time, the have taken a hawkish position on North Ko- North Korean regime would collapse. rea, including the Defense Forum Founda- After September 11, although North tion (founded in 1987 and run by conserva- Korea was quick to condemn the attacks tive luminary and former secretary of the against the United States and signed several navy J. William Middendorf), Concerned international protocols on terrorism, the Women for America (whose mission is to Bush administration did not move to im- “promote Biblical values among all citi- prove relations. Indeed, in rapid succession, zens”), and the Institute on Religion and the U.S. government identified North Korea Democracy (founded in 1981 to take on the as a member of the “axis of evil” and a pos- “secular agenda of the Left”).7 While these sible target for a nuclear first strike (under groups did not succeed in pushing the ad- the Nuclear Posture Review). The unravel- ministration toward a policy of promoting ing of the Agreed Framework—after the regime change in North Korea, they did United States accused North Korea in Octo- succeed in making it difficult for the Clin- ber 2002 of working on its prohibited high- ton administration to abide fully by its ly enriched uranium program and Pyong- promises under the Agreed Framework. yang’s subsequent condemnation of the U.S. If the 2000 presidential election had suspension of fuel oil shipments—removed brought a Democrat to the White House, an obstacle in the path of those who were in the role of the NED and other groups op- favor of regime change.8 posed to engagement with North Korea Heartened by the downturn in U.S.- might have remained marginal. When North Korean relations, members of the re- George W. Bush became president, how- ligious and political right who wanted hu- ever, a number of Scoop Jackson protégés man rights on the negotiating table worked returned to power. These newly triumphant with such members of Congress as Republi- neoconservatives were not interested in pur- can senator Sam Brownback to hold hear- suing Clintonian engagement, which they ings on the condition not only of North Ko- by and large viewed as appeasement. After reans living in North Korea but of the many spending several months reviewing U.S. thousands who had crossed the border into policy toward North Korea in early 2001, China. The bills that emerged from this the Bush administration concluded that the lobbying campaign—a Senate version that leadership in Pyongyang was untrustworthy pushed hard for regime change (the North and a significant policy shift was in order. Korean Freedom Act) and a softer House Instead of following up on the deal the version (the North Korean Human Rights Clinton administration was pursuing when Act)—attempted to inject human rights is- it left office, the Bush team wanted to rene- sues into the security dialogue with respect gotiate the 1994 Agreed Framework and to North Korea’s nuclear program. Demo- broaden the discussion beyond North Ko- crats and moderate Republicans preferred rea’s missile and nuclear programs to in- the House bill, and their view prevailed. clude troop concentrations and even internal In addition to including provisions changes. Given its distrust of Pyongyang that would make it easier for North Koreans and its view of the Agreed Framework as to gain asylum in the United States, the little more than nuclear blackmail, the Bush North Korean Human Rights Act author- administration’s announcement in the sum- izes $8 million over four years for organiza- mer of 2001 that it would continue to nego- tions promoting human rights in North tiate with North Korea rang hollow. Presi- Korea—presumably the very organizations dent Bush, like his two immediate predeces- that rallied support for the bill in conserva- sors, clearly believed that with the applica- tive circles and among Korean-American

The Forgotten Lessons of Helsinki 35 churches. It also allocates another $8 mil- fertile ground for missionary work. They lion to “promote freedom of information,” have distributed bibles in North Korea’s including for smuggling radios into North Rajin-Sonbong free-trade zone and sent Korea. According to the logic of this provi- religious tracts by helium balloon over the sion, giving North Koreans more informa- border from China.10 While some of the tion about the outside world will stimulate missionary work directed at North Korea demand for change from within. is genuinely humanitarian in nature—such A key element in the North Korean Hu- as the creation of an underground railroad man Rights Act links the provision of hu- to help resettle North Korean refugees— manitarian aid to improved monitoring and much of it is designed to evangelize among distribution of food assistance. All nonhu- refugees or to prepare for wider activity manitarian aid—including, presumably, en- within North Korea itself when the oppor- ergy assistance that might figure in any fu- tunity arises. ture agreement between the United States The second group, more bipartisan and and North Korea—is linked to the elimina- secular, is the U.S. Committee for Human tion of Pyongyang’s notorious labor camps Rights in North Korea. It is led by former and the decriminalization of political ex- NED staffperson Debra Liang-Fenton and pression and activity. In the earlier Senate boasts several notable hard-liners on its bill, the president would not have been per- board of directors, from the Defense Forum mitted to waive such funding requirements; Foundation’s Suzanne Scholte to former in the current act, these requirements are Reagan administration official Fred Iklé. couched as a “sense of Congress” resolution Prohibited by law from lobbying Congress, and, as such, are nonbinding. Given North the committee has brought its influence to Korea’s refusal to discuss human rights in bear in other ways—for example, by spon- the context of the ongoing six-party talks soring the influential 2003 report on North (between the United States, North Korea, Korean human rights by former Amnesty South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia) International director David Hawk. The re- with respect to its nuclear program, it port integrated disparate defector accounts, would be unwise of any U.S. administra- showed satellite photographs of labor tion to follow Congress on this matter. camps, and attempted to quantify the scale Two groups tied by affinity and person- of abuses in North Korea; it received con- nel to the NED had a strong influence on the siderable media attention and contributed thrust of this legislation, the most recent to the shaping of the current legislation. version of which has now passed the Senate There is little doubt that the human and is awaiting the president’s signature. rights situation in North Korea is grim. The first group, the North Korea Freedom Even if the question were simply one of how Coalition, is made up of religious and po- to address this problem in the face of a re- litically conservative organizations, includ- calcitrant regime, there would be no simple ing the Christian Coalition, the Salvation answers. When the question is complicated Army, Concerned Women for America, by the issue of nuclear proliferation, the in- and the Defense Forum Foundation. Much fluence of the religious right in domestic as it forced the human rights situation in politics, and diverging views on engage- Sudan onto the State Department’s agenda, ment with the “axis of evil,” the problem the Christian right has put its political becomes knottier still. Not least among the muscle behind the issue of North Korean complicating factors is the mistaken belief human rights.9 Christian evangelicals from of some groups—including the NED, the Korean-American and South Korean U.S. Committee for Human Rights in churches have long eyed North Korea as North Korea, and the North Korea Freedom

36 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • FALL 2004 Coalition—that North Korea is suscepti- promoted multilaterally (for example, the ble to the same sort of pressures that were follow-on meetings of the Helsinki process) brought to bear on Eastern Europe and the and bilaterally (such as through Ostpolitik). Soviet Union. Engagement was sometimes confrontational, sometimes overly bureaucratic, but it led to Errors of Translation real improvements in human rights. East Basic human values may well be as consis- European governments felt that they had tent across borders as are the mathematical something to lose if they failed to respond principles that underlie market economics. on human rights issues. No such engage- But whether respect for human rights takes ment framework exists between North Ko- root in a country depends to a great extent rea and the other states in East Asia. on that nation’s political culture. With some exceptions, the push to im- In the absence of civil society in North prove human rights in North Korea is being Korea, outside human rights organizations placed against, rather than within, an en- have no partnering opportunities. With the gagement framework. This is because the signing of the Helsinki Accords, Helsinki real goal is regime change. Consider, for ex- Watch groups in Eastern Europe translated ample, the provisions in the North Korean the international language of human rights Human Rights Act that would encourage into the political and cultural language of an outflow of refugees from North Korea. individual countries. But any individual es- Advocates argue that the regime in Py- pousing human rights in North Korea today ongyang will be susceptible to the same would be imprisoned and very possibly exe- sort of pressure as that produced by the out- cuted. (Indeed, even possession of a radio flow of East Germans in 1989 on the East that can pick up Radio Free Asia may have German regime. But it would be better similar consequences.) Human rights groups to look at and Vietnam, where simi- in Eastern Europe were able to communicate lar out-migrations only strengthened the with each other with the assistance of out- regimes in power by serving as a safety valve side human rights organizations. North Ko- against internal dissent. Moreover, encour- rea is isolated, however, and human rights aging North Korean emigration in the ab- organizations have virtually no leverage sence of mechanisms in China to handle the with the regime in Pyongyang. flow would raise expectations without ful- Some commentators have argued that, as filling them. with the Helsinki Accords, any agreement Nor is pressure from outside North that comes out of the six-party talks ought Korea likely to be welcome among the citi- to include a human rights component.11 zenry. Indeed, given the strength of Korean Since the current talks concern a pressing nationalism, and particularly the North security issue—North Korea’s nuclear pro- Korean variant that is fused with juche, a gram—a more apt comparison would be to philosophy of self-reliance, such pressure the arms control negotiations between the may well backfire. Thus, we are unlikely to United States and the Soviet Union. None see a “velvet revolution” in North Korea. of the arms control agreements negotiated Some critics have accused the North Ko- in the 1970s and 1980s by the Nixon, rean regime of genocide. But the regime’s Carter, and Reagan administrations linked human rights abuses do not sink to that security questions to human rights. Pressure level. For one thing, the North Korean gov- for improvements in the human rights situ- ernment has not systematically targeted an ation in Eastern Europe and the Soviet ethnic group with the purpose of eliminat- Union did occur, of course, but within a ing that group. Still, the government could framework of numerous East-West links be accused of carrying out “auto-genocide,”

The Forgotten Lessons of Helsinki 37 much like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia Among other things, it could trigger in the 1970s. To make genocide a more an enormous humanitarian crisis. Millions credible charge, some critics have attempted of North Koreans suffer from malnutrition, to pad the number of victims of state repres- and if the collapse of the government were sion by including famine deaths. As Senator to lead to the breakdown of the distribu- Brownback said during a congressional tion system, many would likely die. South briefing earlier this year, in speaking of the Korea would be hard-pressed to meet the deaths that have taken place in North Korea needs of the North. (Experts estimate over the last decade, “Two million people that reunification would cost Seoul about dying in North Korea off of a gulag or a $1.35 trillion, or three times South Korea’s political system or off of starvation is a hor- annual gross domestic product, which is rific thing.”12 The suggestion was that the one of the reasons that South Korean offi- persistent food shortages experienced by cials are taking a go-slow approach toward North Korea during this period were a hu- reunification.) man rights violation rather than the result Moreover, if the current North Korean of systemic breakdown. But there is no regime were to collapse, it is unlikely that credible evidence that Pyongyang has used we would see a democratic government take famine as a weapon against the Korean peo- its place since the North has no experience ple; its penal system is designed to handle with democratic governance or opposition all real or imagined threats to the estab- politics. It is more likely that we would lished order. If the regime had intended to see an even more hard-line faction seize use famine as a political weapon—as the power. And while the North Korean mili- Soviet Union did to put down agrarian re- tary is not in good shape, it still has plenty sistance in Ukraine in the 1930s—it is not of weapons, including weapons of mass de- likely that it would have undermined its struction. Regime collapse could well trig- doctrine of self-reliance and risked opening ger civil war. up the country to outside ideas by asking The human rights strategy in Eastern the United Nations and other nongovern- Europe in the 1980s was aimed at improv- mental agencies for help, and by allowing ing the real conditions of people living in their representatives to set up offices in Py- the Soviet bloc, strengthening indigenous ongyang and to travel throughout the coun- movements seeking to liberalize society, and try. All famines, as the economist Amartya promoting regime change from within. Sen has argued, have political causes, but Human rights activists in the West gener- this does not mean that the North Korean ally believed in the capacity of people living regime has deliberately attempted to starve in these countries to bring about change the people into submission. themselves. A human rights model was not imposed from the outside. Rather, it was The Right Policy pressed from inside and sustained through Let us assume for the moment that aggres- engagement. sive promotion of human rights, accompa- The North Korean situation is not nied by other measures to precipitate regime analogous, however, because there is no change (economic sanctions, interdiction movement for opening up the country of weapons of mass destruction, and mili- from within. This makes a policy of engage- tary containment) succeed and, as the ment all the more important, because it is neoconservatives hope, the regime in Py- through engagement that human rights ongyang collapses. So far, so good, except issues can be raised and pursued—as the that the results of regime collapse could gradual improvement of human rights in be catastrophic. China suggests.

38 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • FALL 2004 The Bush administration has generally man Rights and Non-Intervention,” in A. Bloed viewed engagement with North Korea as and P. Van Dijk, eds., Essays on Human Rights in the a form of appeasement, much as the Right Helsinki Process (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985). in the 1970s saw the Helsinki Final Act 6. Information about the NED conference is as a betrayal. The neoconservative heirs from the author’s personal notes of the proceedings. of Scoop Jackson are interested in human 7. For an explication of the NED’s policy on rights largely to the extent that arguments North Korea, see Carl Gershman, “Promoting framed in those terms are useful for bolster- Democracy in the Post-9/11 World: The Case of ing the case for toppling the regimes they North Korea,” presentation to the Institute for oppose. They and their allies on the Chris- Corean-American Studies symposium, “Humanity, tian right are playing a dangerous game. Peace, and Security,” Washington, DC, October 11, If the six-party talks fail, hopes for a denu- 2002, at http://www.ned.org/about/carl/oct clearized Korean peninsula would fade. 1102.html. And if the collapse of the current regime 8. While North Korea violated the Agreed in Pyongyang were to lead to civil war or Framework with its secret highly enriched uranium a takeover by an even more brutal govern- program, the extent of this program remains unclear. ment, North Koreans would suffer the con- For a more in-depth look at the transformation of sequences. In their belief that only con- Korea policy under the Bush administration, see frontational tactics—all sticks and no car- John Feffer, North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at rots—work against “totalitarian” regimes, a Time of Crisis (New York: Seven Stories, 2003), the Bush administration and its supporters pp. 91–121. have forgotten the lessons of Helsinki. 9. The Christian right has been aided in its en- • deavors by the Hudson Institute and Freedom Notes House, among other organizations. World Magazine, 1. See Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: a weekly that covers the news “from a Christian per- Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Hu- spective” has devoted considerable space to the issue man Rights (New York: Random House, 2001). of North Korean human rights (see Mindy Belz, 2. Minnesota Lawyers International Human “Kim’s Keepers,” August 16, 2003; and Anne Morse, Rights Committee and Human Rights Watch/Asia, “Underwater Railroad,” October 5, 2002). See also “Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic Kate O’Beirne, “Their Brothers’ Keepers: The Con- of Korea (North Korea),” December 1988. servative Shade of Human-rights Activists,” National 3. See Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loy- Review, June 30, 2003. alty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and 10. See, for example, “South Korean Churches’ States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Missionary Work in China ‘Problematic,’” Amity 1970). News Service, at http://www.amityfoundation.org/ 4. See David Hawk, The Hidden Gulag: Exposing ANS/Articles/ans97/ans97.2/97_2_4.htm; and Yoon North Korea’s Prison Camps (Washington, DC: U.S. Kwon Chae, “Christians in North Korea,” Horizons, Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, September 2000. 2003). 11. See, for example, Roberta Cohen, “Talking 5. During the negotiations of the Helsinki Ac- Human Rights with North Korea,” Washington Post, cords, the United States argued for “nonintervention” August 30, 2004. Cohen, who serves on the board of (restricted to military actions) as opposed to the So- the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Ko- viet Union’s insistence on “noninterference” (which rea, makes the common mistake of misapplying the could apply to a range of methods of influencing do- European experience to North Korea. mestic policy). Washington won this point, paving 12. “Update on the North Korean Nuclear Is- the way for the inclusion of human rights in the final sue,” Hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Com- document. See Arie Bloed and Pieter van Dijk, “Hu- mittee, Federal News Service, January 21, 2004.

The Forgotten Lessons of Helsinki 39