Land, others offer ‘third way’ on North Korea
- Aug 11, 2006 -
ERLC President Richard Land has joined a diverse coalition urging a “third way” in dealing with North Korea that rejects military action but promotes human rights reforms.
The coalition released an 18-point statement of principles in response to what it described as the dominant policies proposed regarding North Korea after the communist regime conducted missile tests in early July. Those policy options – bombing North Korea or signing an agreement with the regime that ignores human rights — are both unsatisfactory and inconsistent with the values and interests of the United States, the coalition said.
“Just as the threat of nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union did not disappear until people behind the Iron Curtain won their freedom, security on the Korean Peninsula will also depend on progress towards human rights in North Korea,” the coalition said in its statement. “The goals of liberty and security are intertwined; the international community must pursue them on a linked, coordinated and interactive basis.”
Among the recommendations proposed by the coalition are: (1) The United States should offer an “unconditional humanitarian aid initiative,” including an inoculation program for all of North Korea’s children and the renovation and building of hospitals and water purification plants in the Asian country. (2) The United States should increase, and South Korea should be strongly encouraged to increase, the number of North Korean refugees it admits. (3) The United States and other governments should make China’s reprehensible treatment of North Koreans a higher priority, pressuring the communist giant to end its forcible return of North Korean refugees to their country. (4) Talks with the regime of dictator Kim Jong Il should emulate the 1970s Helsinki approach toward the Soviet Union by calling for human rights commitments while also dealing with “security, economic and humanitarian” issues.
“This is not going to be easy,” Land said at a July 20 Washington news conference at which the statement was released. “North Korea will be a tough nut to crack. . . . the Soviet Union was a lot tougher nut to crack, and the Helsinki approach, a steady, solid approach that always had a basket of human rights issues involved in negotiations, was instrumental in allowing the Soviet Jews to leave the Soviet Union and, I believe, eventually in leading to the rebirth of freedom in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.”
Messengers to the June meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention approved a resolution calling on China to grant refugee status to North Koreans who have fled their country and encouraging the United States and other countries to accept North Koreans as refugees.
Kim’s regime, which especially represses Christians and other religious adherents, has been, and continues to be, a perpetrator of a variety of human rights violations, according to reports. Among these are the detention, torture – including forced abortions – and execution of political prisoners. Human rights officials estimate 200,000 political prisoners remain in North Korea’s gulag system and about 400,000 inmates have died in those prisons in the last three decades. The regime has diverted foreign food aid to the military or the black market, thereby contributing to the starvation of an estimated 2 million to more than 4 million North Koreans since a famine began in 1995.
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