hankyoreh

Illustration by Kim Dae-jung

Recently, a South Korean diplomat gave an academic presentation on North Korean human rights in Oslo, Norway. The screen displayed a series of horrific scenes of kkotjebi, a North Korean term for orphaned children who live on the streets, and political prison camps as they’d been reconstructed from defectors’ memories.

As the presenter said, North Korea certainly seemed to have one of the world’s worst human rights situations. Naturally enough, the panel members expressed their general agreement about the South Korean diplomat’s claims.

But in the Q&A session, a foreign diplomat who had worked in Pyongyang raised his hand. He didn’t object to the presenter’s information about the abysmal state of human rights in North Korea. He noted that he’d realized the severity of the human rights situation while working in the country.

What that diplomat wanted to know is why several dozen North Korean defectors (more precisely, 31 over the past decade) have voluntarily returned to North Korea if it’s such a hellscape of human rights abuses. Whatever personal reasons they might have, such as missing their families, it seemed illogical that they would go from “heaven to hell.”

The question seemed to sap the presenter’s confidence, and the answers he gave sounded more like excuses. “They had trouble adapting to South Korean capitalism.” “They claimed to have suffered discrimination in South Korean society.” “Adjusting to the South Korean labor environment might have been challenging.”

But his responses seemed inadequate to satisfy the audience’s curiosity. How severe must discrimination be — and how bad must labor conditions be — for defectors to return of their own free will to North Korea, the poorest country in East Asia, a country notorious around the world for its human rights record?

At this point, I wanted to pose a question of my own. How does the South Korean government explain the shocking fact that, according to a 2015 survey, suicide is the cause of 15% of deaths among North Korean defectors, three times higher than for the population as a whole?

Another question I had was why 18% of defectors said they wanted to return to North Korea according to a survey carried out last year by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights. But the presentation ended before I had a chance to ask either of my questions.

To be sure, the horrific nature of North Korea’s human situation is sure to stand out in a simple comparison of human rights in the two Koreas. There’s nothing strange about that.

People sometimes talk about “God-given rights,” as if human rights were a gift from the heavens. But the fact is that human rights are not a naturally occurring phenomenon.

The very concept of human rights has no validity inside a group of humans who are merely seeking to survive. For human rights to be protected, a society must have accumulated enough wealth to satisfy the various needs of its constituents. There must also be some degree of security in society and enough international exchange for it to share human rights standards with other countries.

Nobody, at least among human rights experts, expects that human rights will be adequately protected in a society like North Korea that is run like a massive military organization that lacks parliamentary politics and the principle of the separation of powers, a society that must maintain an atmosphere of total military mobilization atop an extremely weak material foundation (the “state of exception” described by Giorgio Agamben).

Compared to that, the human rights situation in South Korea, epitomized by the discrimination, contempt and various human rights abuses suffered by defectors, comes as a much bigger surprise.

North Korea is a particularly severe example of the typical issues suffered by postcolonial countries in the Third World, including poverty and monopolization of social resources by the ruling class. But South Korea is a First World society that is the envy of many people around the world, with parliamentary politics and a per capita national income on the level of Europe.

In such a society, one might reasonably expect that human rights would be protected at a level typical for the First World, but that expectation would be entirely wrong. Korea continues to score 5, at the very bottom, in the Global Rights Index that’s published every year by the International Trade Union Confederation.

Recall the suicide note written by a labor activist in the construction industry who recently immolated himself to protest the government’s suppression of the labor movement. “All we’ve done is engage in the legitimate activities of a labor union. Many innocent people will have to die and many more will be jailed as political scapegoats to boost the approval rating of dictatorial Prosecutor-in-Chief Yoon Suk-yeol.”

This short passage is a more eloquent expression of the reality of Korean labor rights than a thousand-page report could ever be.

The brutal suppression of the labor movement is an inevitable consequence of Korea’s approach to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism refers to an economic system in which capital is accumulated by fracturing the working class, forcing workers into precarious jobs, suppressing their wages and subjecting them to extreme exploitation.

It\'s basically impossible for such a system to meaningfully coexist with human rights.

The reason this inhumane type of liberalism has become entrenched in South Korea is because of the oppressive nature that many government bodies have acquired as a result of the division of the Korean Peninsula.

The South Korean state, being much more powerful than its counterpart in North Korea, doesn’t need to maintain a “state of exception” as the North does. Nevertheless, South Korea maintains the highest level of militarization of any wealthy country because of its continuing confrontation with the North.

And so even after South Korea ratified the International Labour Organization’s Convention No. 29 (which bans forced labor), it has gained a stigma for forced labor because social service agents (people who are doing an alternative to mandatory military service) are basically compelled to work in environments that are rife with bullying and verbal abuse.

Could that happen in a country that wasn’t as highly militarized as South Korea? To be sure, the level of human rights abuses resulting from mutual confrontation and militarization is probably much worse in North Korea, where the state is much weaker.

In order to improve the human rights situation in both South and North Korea, the first priority should be easing tensions on the Korean Peninsula through inter-Korean dialogue.

South and North Korea will have to enter a thaw before North Korea, as the more vulnerable partner, will find itself comfortable with easing, at least to some extent, its military grip on society.

As it currently stands, the climate of confrontation incites the North Korean state to tighten its grip on society, including the crackdown on South Korean media, while fomenting a conservative mood in South Korea that encourages labor crackdowns.

We need to remember that the state of the relationship between South and North Korea — which together constitute a single system of division and confrontation — has a massive impact on both societies. That relationship will have to improve if they’re to find a way to better the human rights situation.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]