As he pursues a nuclear deal with Kim Jong Un, human rights advocates hope Trump won’t forget to focus on Kim’s domestic abuses.
Before he agreed to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, President Donald Trump called him a vicious human rights abuser — “a madman who doesn’t mind starving or killing his people.” He has described a “horror of life” that is “so complete that citizens… would rather be slaves than live in North Korea.” To his State of the Union address in January, Trump invited a North Korean defector — an amputee who’d fled the country on a set of crutches that he defiantly raised for the cameras as Trump hailed his escape from the “depraved” regime.
Now, as Trump prepares for an unprecedented meeting with Kim to discuss eliminating Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, he has dropped that tough rhetoric and shown no sign that the human rights of North Korea’s citizens will play a role in the talks.
Hoping to change that, a dozen rights groups led by Amnesty International USA sent Trump a letter this week asking him to urge North Korea to release political prisoners and take other steps “to improve its human rights record.” The letter comes on the heels of congressional efforts to spotlight North Korea’s rights abuses, including a bipartisan resolution introduced in April condemning the country’s labor camps.
Although it’s unclear whether those gestures will influence Trump’s thinking, they do underscore the complexity of cutting a deal with what may be the world’s most repressive regime.
Trump’s main goal in the upcoming talks, slated for late May or early June, is to persuade Kim to give up his nuclear arsenal. Anything that muddies the conversation could give Kim — who tolerates no criticism of his domestic policies — grounds to demand more concessions from Washington or even walk away.
But if Trump simply ignores North Korea’s atrocious human rights record, he’ll expose himself to charges of hypocrisy.
Trump also has repeatedly blasted the Iran nuclear deal, negotiated under former President Barack Obama, for narrowly focusing on nuclear issues without tackling Tehran’s non-nuclear misbehavior. Now that Trump has a shot at making a deal with North Korea, will he, too, settle for an arrangement that ignores the country’s non-nuclear activities?
“President Trump is very fond of saying ‘Nobody knew this thing could be so complicated,’ but it’s always complicated – there are always multiple competing priorities,” said Jon Wolfsthal, who worked on North Korea and other nuclear-related issues for Obama. “Trump is going to have to figure out his own solution, and if it doesn’t include everything other people see as a priority, he will be criticized for it.”
North Korea is a totalitarian police state with socialist roots. Most of its 25 million people are poor, while even the elite live in fear of the state. The 30-something Kim, following in his father and grandfather’s footsteps, is thought to have final say on nearly every major government decision. Kim has a barbarous personal reputation: he’s alleged to have executed his uncle and assassinated a half-brother in his quest to consolidate power following his father’s death in 2011.
According to the State Department’s most recent global human rights report, at least 80,000 North Koreans – and possibly many more – are being held as political prisoners. The government often punishes the entire family of a person it says violated its laws, sentencing many to forced labor. North Koreans who have fled the country describe a place with severe restrictions on speech, assembly and other freedoms.
A group of Republican and Democratic lawmakers introduced a resolution last month denouncing North Korea’s labor camps and other abuses, a sign that U. S. lawmakers remain keenly aware of the country’s human rights violations even as Trump prepares to meet with Kim.
“North Korea’s labor camp system is a crime against humanity,” said Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. “It is the duty of the United States — and of every country of conscience — to stand up and stand together in voicing our collective condemnation of these horrors.
