Korean Peninsula

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the security, humanitarian, and human rights situation on the Korean Peninsula.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords from all parts of the House for taking part in today’s short debate. I know that the retiming of the debate will deprive us of several contributions, notably that of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, who has to chair a Select Committee.

The Motion before us focuses, as I will, on three things: security, humanitarian needs and human rights concerns in North Korea. Since 2003, when, with my noble friend Lady Cox, I made the first of four visits to North Korea, I have served as chairman of the All-Party Group on North Korea. Last September, while in China, I visited the River Tumen, where many trying to leave the DPRK have lost their lives.

The continuing security challenges posed by North Korea were underlined by its rocket launch in December and reports a week ago that it may be about to conduct its third nuclear test. Last Friday, the Russian ambassador to the UN Security Council, Vitaly Churkin, said:

“Our position is that the North Korean rocket launch is a violation of a UN Security Council resolution, so the council should react”.

Even more significantly, China is also likely to support a new resolution this week—a significant diplomatic blow to Pyongyang, about which the Minister will doubtless say more. We are talking about the most militarised country on earth, with the world’s fourth largest army and biggest special forces. North Korea’s arsenal includes the full array of weapons of mass destruction: a plutonium-based nuclear weapons programme now supplemented by uranium enrichment; the world’s third largest chemical weapons arsenal; possible biological weapons; and a range of ballistic missiles.

A failure to hammer out a long-term political settlement and a conflict triggered by a Sarajevo moment would replicate the horrendous haemorrhaging loss of life that saw the catastrophic deaths of around 3 million people in the Korean War. The 2010 sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island underline North Korea’s capacity to initiate hostility, and, in the cyber domain, interference with the GPS systems of planes using Seoul’s busy airports, all indicate North Korea’s ability to inflict harm, short of invasion.

An isolated rogue state has the power to inflict other miseries, too, including drug trafficking, currency counterfeiting, crimes of abduction and the transfer of nuclear technology, which can be sold to terrorists or to countries such as Iran, and which I hope the Minister will comment upon. Since 1953, North Korea has promoted an ideology based on “military first”. For both sides, it has largely been a case of military first, second and third. In this context, Kim Jong-un was right in his New Year’s Day assertion that,

“past records of inter-Korean relations show that confrontation between fellow countrymen leads to nothing but war”.

In a similar vein, the Republic of Korea’s new President, Park Geun-hye, has called for deeper engagement. She said:

“While we cannot allow the North to develop nuclear weapons ... we must keep open the possibility of dialogue, including humanitarian aid”.

Britain has diplomatic relations with both sides and should build on the successful 2011 visit of Choe Tae Bok, the Speaker of the North Korean Supreme Assembly, who expressed interest in both our Northern Ireland peace process and the Hong Kong formula of two systems in one country. As the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan clearly understood, advocating the use of soft power should not be confused with being a soft touch.

President Park made reference to the dire humanitarian situation—my second point. Two million died during the 1990s North Korean famine. Our previous two excellent ambassadors in Pyongyang both issued warnings about the reappearance of malnutrition, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Co-ordinator, when she spoke to our all-party group last year. In July in the House I warned of the unacceptable use of food as a “weapon of war”. Food deprivation and malnutrition lead to physical frailty and stunting, long-term intellectual impairment and increased vulnerability to disease. North Korea’s leaders might reflect that the cost of their missile launch—more than £500 million—could have bought 2.5 million tonnes of corn and 1.4 million tonnes of rice. I hope that the Minister will give her assessment of the current food situation and Kim Jong-un’s recent announcements of Chinese-style agricultural reform, as well as her assessment of the welcome brokering by Jang Song-taek—Kim Jong-un’s uncle—of two new joint economic zones with China.

Thirdly, on human rights, according to the United Nations, 200,000 people are languishing in festering prison camps—the kwan-li-so—where 400,000 people have died in the past 30 years. In an evidence session here, Shin Dong Hyok described how he was born and spent 23 years in Camp 14 and was tortured and subjected to forced labour. At 14, he was made to watch the execution of his mother and brother. BBC Radio 4 has broadcast extracts of his harrowing story The evidence given to our committee and described in a House of Commons debate initiated by Mrs Fiona Bruce MP include accounts of executions, torture, detention, forced labour, trafficking, religious persecution and the “guilt by association” policy, which leads to the arrest, imprisonment and punishment of detainees’ families for up to three generations. We have also heard of women impregnated by Chinese men facing forced abortions or infanticide following deportation by China.

When did the British Government last raise with the Government of China the issues of forced repatriation, the absence of a refugee adjudication process, the denial of access by the UNHCR and the other matters to which I referred? A few months ago, I raised in your Lordships’ House the use of capital punishment. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, said that officials from the Foreign Office would reply to me on that point, but I still have not received a reply.

Just a week ago, describing what she called a “beleaguered, subjugated population”, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, called for an international inquiry into serious crimes, a proposal supported by around 50 human rights organisations. She said that security questions,

“should not be allowed to overshadow the deplorable human rights situation … which in one way or another affects almost the entire population and has no parallel anywhere … in the world”.

North Korea has never allowed United Nations special rapporteurs on human rights to enter the country, but with 25,000 North Koreans living in the south and an estimated 100,000 living illegally in China, there would be no shortage of evidence for such an inquiry to assess.

Straightforwardly, do Her Majesty’s Government support the creation of a United Nations-sponsored commission of inquiry, and will we vote for it if it comes to a vote? Historians will surely question our generation’s extraordinary indifference to North Korea’s gulag archipelago.

Looking to the future, an approach based on Helsinki-style engagement would surely seek to build on the small advances of recent years. One is in education. Here I make reference to the remarkable story of Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, to the first Chevening scholars at Cambridge, and to the use of English as the north’s second official language. This should encourage the BBC World Service to respond positively to the 18 Korean organisations which have requested broadcasts to the Korean peninsula—an issue which Peter Horrocks, the director of BBC Global News, will address at the all-party group on Wednesday of this week.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

“Everyone has the right … to receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”.

The World Service’s 80th anniversary—and its role in places such as the former Soviet Union and Burma—is a timely reminder of the power of ideas. We know that 14% of defectors say they listened to foreign broadcasts, and 44% of those questioned said that they admired foreign societies. Two weeks ago Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, were in North Korea urging internet freedom.

Not to encourage reform, not to invest in promoting progress and not to break the information blockade would render pointless Britain’s millennium decision to forge diplomatic relations with the DPRK. We owe it to the coming generation, to the Koreans who perish during their hazardous escapes, to those who suffer from a lack of food or medicine, and to those who are the victims of an ideology that has become prisoner of its own rhetoric, to do better than simply offer Cassandra-like predictions of thermonuclear war—predictions which, if they came to pass, would reduce the whole peninsula to an irradiated cemetery.

As today we assess the security, humanitarian and human rights challenges on the Korean peninsula, with the new leadership in the north and south and in China, too, and with today’s second-term inauguration of a United States President, surely there is a moment for change: a time to end the war and to replace it with long overdue peace and prosperity.