Korean Peninsula

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of security challenges and related human rights violations on the Korean Peninsula.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, in 2003, after taking the testimony of an escapee from North Korea, whose wife and three children had died there, I initiated a debate in your Lordships’ House. I described a,

“corrupt, paranoid and tyrannical regime”,

responsible for “unbelievable brutality and viciousness”. I said:

“This regime has subjugated its own people and now threatens and blackmails the world’s democracies. It does so by threatening nuclear war unless the free world accedes to its demands. To do nothing about North Korea would be the most dangerous option of all”.—[Official Report, 13/3/03; cols. 1546-48.].


Those remarks led to four visits to North Korea, three of them with my noble friend Lady Cox. In subsequent reports we argued for a Helsinki-style critical engagement, increasing the pressure for human rights, in combination with a firm policy of military containment. We argued for a breaking of the information blockade and for the centrality of China’s role, and said that we had to distinguish between what we described in one of our reports as a “decaying political ideology” and the,

“courageous Korean people, caught in this nexus of danger and despair”.

In 2004, we founded the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea, which I co-chair. It has held many public hearings with escapees, including prisoners jailed for political or religious beliefs, highlighting the depredations of the gulags, the use of child labour and the Stalinesque purges and executions.

In 2010, in a debate in your Lordships’ House, I called for the creation of a United Nations Commission of Inquiry into human rights violations. It was established in 2013, and the Sages Group, of which I am a member, remains focused on the commission’s findings.

The all-party group also secured agreement for BBC World Service broadcasts which, with smuggled USB sticks and DVDs, will help to prise open a closed society and counter propaganda that literally teaches people to hate.

North Korea is caught in a time warp which has its origins in the armistice of 27 July 1953, designed to put a temporary halt to a war that claimed up to 3 million lives. Sixty years later, a short-term armistice is still in place and a solution is still pending. Having done too little to change the weather, we now find ourselves on the edge of a nuclear winter. We called it “strategic patience”—patient yes; strategic or urgent, no.

James Mattis, the United States Defense Secretary, is in little doubt about how catastrophic a new war would be, saying that a conflict in North Korea,

“would be the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes”.

Miscalculation, rather than design, is capable of triggering a “Sarajevo” moment, and with more than a million troops under arms and some 8,000 artillery pieces located within range of half the South’s population, this is not a moment for sending the wrong signals.

It was Winston Churchill who insisted that:

“The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events”.


But he also warned about the dangers of appeasement—of feeding the crocodiles who end up eating you. He said that there will come a point when:

“The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences”.


If we have not quite reached that moment, we are perilously close to it and on the brink of the irreversible.

When the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, warned in early January that his country was in the “final stages” of preparing an intercontinental ballistic missile, Donald Trump tweeted, “It won’t happen!”. Last week, on American Independence Day, it did. That, the return to America of a dying student, Otto Warmbier, and the holding of three other United States citizens as hostages, whose plight was reported yesterday to be worsening, inevitably becomes a casus belli. It is impossible for the United States to contemplate open talks while their citizens are incarcerated, and now with ICBMs, North Korea would be unwise to believe that the United States would easily accept a nuclear freeze. Attempting to perfect the miniaturisation of its nuclear warheads to mount on an ICBM simply increases the danger and the urgency. I suggest four areas in which to swiftly target our focus: diplomacy, sanctions, North Korean operatives and judicial action.

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, warned that North Korea’s actions were,

“quickly closing off the possibility of a diplomatic solution”.

President Trump has also told South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in that dialogue with North Korea remains open “under the right circumstances”. China would gain great credit from brokering such an initiative.

But let us be realistic. North Korea has flouted the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, two nuclear safeguard agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency, an inter-Korean denuclearisation agreement, and denuclearisation agreements with the United States in 1994, 2005, 2007 and 2012. It has sent assassins to kill Kim Jong-nam and human rights activists, proliferated ballistic missiles, sold weapons to terrorists, attacked South Korea on numerous occasions, helped Syria employ chemical weapons and engaged in cyberwarfare, including against the United Kingdom. Reason, not hope, should inform any effective policy, and reason tells us that North Korea will not negotiate its nuclear and missile programmes away.

The quest for deterrence may well trigger a race for atomic weapons within the region. South Korea, Japan and even Taiwan may follow suit, none of which would be welcomed by China any more than a failed state on its border and the prospect of millions of refugees destabilising China and the region. Yet despite the gains from a diplomatic breakthrough, both China and Russia—with its increasing business links and trade, along with the use of North Korean labour in its timber camps—seem more interested in cornering the United States than in cornering North Korea or in encouraging fundamental change. With the flick of a switch, China could bring North Korea to the table, but there is a growing belief that it suits China to leave Washington dangling. This year, Chinese trade has increased by 40% and banks continue to launder North Korean money. Paradoxically, it is prosperity and market reforms that ultimately will fundamentally change North Korea, but in the short term, toughened Chinese sanctions might bring the North Koreans to the table and help to avert a catastrophic war.

We should note also that a recent UN report confirmed that North Korea uses foreign banks to access European and US financial systems. Why is this still the case? Moreover, what of the North Korean operatives as generators of hard currency for North Korea? For years, the UN Panel of Experts has named and located North Korean operatives working around the world. Some make money for the regime in seemingly legitimate businesses, while others engage in more sinister activities such as the purchase of weapons-related materials and assassination. Why too was the Korea National Insurance Corporation able to use London to generate more than £113 million to support both the regime and its nuclear weapons programme? An estimated 100,000 North Koreans are working in timber camps and in stadia in Qatar and St Petersburg where they are said to be treated like prisoners of war, in Chinese sweatshops and in Malaysian mines, and are forced to return most of the nearly $2 billion they generate each year in wages to the regime.

Let me finally also speak of justice and act on the United Nations commission of inquiry’s recommendation that the regime be held to account through the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. The prospect of justice helped to concentrate the minds of the military regime in Burma and it can play its part in North Korea too. In Geneva this year, Tomás Quintana, the UN Special Rapporteur on North Korea, and a group of independent experts called again for an ICC referral or, in the event of a veto at the Security Council, for the establishment of an ad hoc international tribunal. Crimes against humanity are by definition a concern for all of humanity, and a failure to take appropriate action sends a deplorable signal to despots around the world. Democratic nations should issue arrest warrants for North Korean officials. Any representative of the regime should be detained and tried for complicity in crimes against humanity. We should also downgrade our British diplomatic presence, which is treated contemptuously by North Korea while providing it with a veneer of legitimacy.

North Korea is not a normal nation. It is a brutal totalitarian regime that starves its people while simply seeking its own survival. But a better outcome is still possible if the international community pursues a hard-headed, effective and reasoned foreign policy that unites a concern for security and human rights while supporting Koreans who are working for change. Doing nothing remains the most dangerous option of all, and I thank all noble Lords who are to participate in this debate for drawing attention to these issues.