How has North Korea reacted to a historic United Nations vote to begin the process to refer its leadership to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity?
By threatening nuclear strikes on the
US, Japan, South Korea and all US "followers". In other words, by
offering to commit further crimes against humanity.
"It would be funny if it were not
so serious," says the man who gathered the evidence for the case,
Australia's Michael Kirby.
"You should always take seriously
threats by someone in charge of a nation state, especially if they have
possession of a reported 20 nuclear weapons," Kirby tells me.
But, tellingly, North Korea seems more
frightened by Kirby's report and the consequences than any of its target
countries are by its threat of "unimaginable and catastrophic
consequences."
Supreme
Leader Kim Jong Un, aged approximately 30, has done everything possible to stop
Kirby's report and to avoid its consequences.
Under a UN
mandate, Kirby chaired a year-long inquiry into human rights abuses in the
dictatorship.
North Korea
has been repressing its people brutally and systematically under all three
generations of the Kim family dynasty since they first took power in 1948.
Yet, believe
it or not, this was the first time the UN has taken the problem seriously
enough to order an official inquiry.
Pyongyang
refused to co-operate so the former High Court judge and his two fellow
commissioners, one from Indonesia and the other from Serbia, travelled to
various countries and took evidence from about 80 North Korean escapees and
expert witnesses.
Their
findings? "The commission finds that the body of testimony and other
information it received establishes that crimes against humanity have been
committed" in North Korea, said the report published in February.
"These
crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture,
imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on
political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of
populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of
knowingly causing prolonged starvation."
They
specifically named as a "main perpetrator" the supreme leader
himself.
Pyongyang
furiously denounced the report as a "fraud" and a tactic of "the
frantic human rights racket" and labelled the witnesses who had come forth
as "human scum." But all the testimony, given in public, is now on
the public record, on the UN website, for all to see.
Like the
story of Jee Heon-a, who was arrested during the government-induced famine in
1999 for the crime of collecting grass to eat.
Together
with a younger girl who was caught with her, her punishment was to be forced to
eat clods of grass covered in soil. The other girl was immediately gripped by
diarrhoea, she said: "Suddenly she couldn't get up or turn over. She died
with her eyes open because she didn't have the strength to close them."
Jee also
told of how she witnessed a mother giving birth in a prison camp and being
forced by guards to drown her own baby in a bucket of water. Jee eventually
managed to flee to South Korea.
Or the story
of Shin Dong-hyuk, an escapee thought to be the only person to escape alive
from Camp 14. Shin was born in the camp. He told of the seven-year-old girl in
his class who was beaten to death by guards for pocketing five grains of wheat.
Shin had
been encouraged to inform on his family. He said he was proud of himself at the
age of 14 when he reported his mother and brother for planning to escape.
"My
older brother was publicly executed and my mother and brother were hanged in
front of me and my father." Now 31, Shin says he thinks he misunderstood
his mother's conversation and that there was no escape plan.
"These
are systemic, grave and violent crimes against humanity, the sorts of crimes
the Nazis committed," Kirby says.
When the UN
committee for human rights decided to put the Kirby report to a vote so it
could go to the UN General Assembly and then to the UN Security Council for
possible referral to the International Criminal Court, North Korea launched
into the next phase.
It went on a
charm offensive. In an effort to head off the vote, the Kim regime freed three
American citizens it had had been holding in jail. It signalled that it was
open to discussing its nuclear program with the US. And so on.
But last
week the UN human rights committee cast a strong vote to refer the Kirby report
to the UN general assembly, by 111 votes to 19 with 55 abstentions.
This sent
Pyongyang into its fury phase. It said the vote compelled it to conduct another
nuclear weapons test, which would be its fourth, and threatened nuclear attack
on the US and its allies.
Why is
Pyongyang so afraid? Even if the report goes to the UN Security Council, even
if North Korea's traditional protectors China and Russia decide not to exercise
their veto, even if it is referred to the International Criminal Court, the
chance of ever getting Kim into the dock at the Hague must be a very small one.
The country already labours under a raft of international sanctions.
"I
think the regime is genuinely shocked," says Kirby. "North Korea is
not used to being the issue, and sailing under the radar. Those days are over.
The international community has had enough."
As the
matter goes to the full General Assemby and then the Security Council in the
days ahead, we will find out whether that it true.
Peter Hartcher is the international editor SMH
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