North Korea

Robert Buckland Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Bruce]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that very important case, on which a number of my colleague parliamentarians have made representations. I believe that the Minister is aware of that case, and I look forward to hearing his comments. I also hope that further representations can be made to the North Korean Government about the release of Dr Oh’s family as part of the amnesty.

The amnesty announcement emphasises what many see as a fresh opportunity, at the start of a new era, to forge further relationships with the people of North Korea. That is the hope of many people in Britain who have worked often for years to develop relationships, and indeed friendships, with people in North Korea to share knowledge, understanding and support. Several of my parliamentary colleagues from the all-party group on North Korea have visited the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—the DPRK—in recent years, as have many other delegations from the UK. Interestingly, in 2010, that included the Middlesbrough Ladies football team, who apparently attracted a 20,000-strong crowd of spectators.

On a more modest level, but no less importantly, the Speaker of the House of Commons has met the Speaker of the North Korean Assembly, Choe Thae-bok. Mr Speaker was able to raise human rights concerns with his DPRK counterpart in a very constructive discussion. Most recently, the DPRK authorities extended an invitation to the Archbishop of Canterbury to visit their country soon, and I hope that he accepts.

The most recent visit of the all-party parliamentary group was in autumn 2010, after which it produced a report, “Building Bridges Not Walls: the Case for Constructive, Critical Engagement with North Korea”. The report describes a welcome commitment from DPRK officials to dialogue, with particular reference to negotiating a peaceful resolution as regards the relationship between North and South Korea. “Building Bridges Not Walls” also states that the APPG had

“the opportunity to see some encouraging developments, including the establishment of a Russian Orthodox Church in which Russian diplomats freely worship; a Protestant seminary; the work of British Council teachers; English-language teaching at Kim il-Sung University…a newly opened e-Library at Kim il-Sung University; and the establishment of the impressive Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), with a faculty of teachers from the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. These are welcome developments which we hope will…contribute towards the establishment of a more open and prosperous society for all the people of North Korea.”

I believe that I speak on behalf of many people in this country who fervently hope that the accession to leadership of Kim Jong-un will further pave the way for that.

The APPG delegation also voiced concerns that cannot be batted away with diplomatic niceties about the need to discuss grave human rights issues in North Korea through a process of constructive critical engagement. That should be done in the same way that President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher established the Helsinki process with the Soviet Union. The APPG reports says:

“It is time for peace, and ‘it is time for Helsinki with a Korean face’.”

In other words, as the human rights researcher David Hawk says, a process is to be encouraged that would

“pursue peace, engagement, and reconciliation in association with the promotion and protection of human rights”.

That sums up more eloquently than I ever could the process that many in Britain desire to see develop in this new era. I would appreciate the Minister’s comments on how the British Government can help to facilitate dialogue to that end.

I turn to the protection of human rights, on which it has to be said that North Korea has, by any international standard, a deplorable record. I was stirred to call for this debate by a visit two months ago to the UK Parliament by a remarkable young man who is now in his late 20s, Shin Dong-hyuk. I understand that he is the only person ever to have escaped from a North Korean prison camp. On hearing Shin’s story, I was moved, by compassion for the North Korean people, to highlight their dignified suffering in order to encourage support for them in their plight. May I record that I called for this debate holding no hatred of the people of North Korea? I am motivated by a deep love for the North Korean people, and by concern for their needs and their deep suffering over decades.

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Fiona Bruce]

I will certainly give way to my hon. Friend, particularly as he is chairman of the Conservative party human rights commission, of which I am privileged to be a serving member.

[Mr Buckland]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. May I reinforce her remarks about the evidence of Shin Dong-hyuk, which was not only moving but informative? He taught us that life in the prison camps was very often the only way of life that families who had been born into captivity knew. When he came to the west, he learned for the first time about the Nazi holocaust, and it instantly reminded him of some of his experiences in North Korea. Is that not very powerful testimony of the depth of deprivation of human rights from which the people of North Korea are suffering?

[Fiona Bruce]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. If you will indulge me, Mr Davies, I shall shortly go into further details of Shin Dong-hyuk’s testimony to us.

It was in meetings with the Conservative party human rights commission, and at an event that I chaired on behalf of the Henry Jackson Society, that Shin Dong-hyuk told his life story. It is the personal testimony of someone who was born into a North Korean prison camp, lived there for 23 years and then escaped. As my hon. Friend says, his story was authoritative, valuable and deeply moving.

Shin Dong-hyuk was born in camp 14 in 1982. Shin described the conditions he endured for the first 23 years of his life. When he was 14 years old, his mother and brother were executed in front of him because they tried to escape. He was held for seven months in solitary confinement. The torture he faced was unimaginably inhumane. With extraordinary dignity and lack of bitterness, he described to us how he was hung upside down by his legs and hands from the ceiling, and on one occasion his body was burned over a fire. His torturers pierced his groin with a steel hook; he lost consciousness.

On another occasion, Shin was assigned to work in a garment factory. Severe hard labour is a common feature of North Korea’s prison camps. He accidentally dropped a sewing machine, and as a punishment the prison guards chopped off his middle finger. According to Shin, couples perceived by the authorities to be good workers are arbitrarily selected by prison guards and permitted, even forced, to get married, with a view to producing children who could, in turn, become model workers. Children born in the prison camp are, like Shin, treated as prisoners from birth. As a child in the prison school, Shin recalled the teacher, who was also a prison guard, telling the children that they were animals whose parents should have been killed. He told them that, by contrast, he, the teacher, was a human, and that they should be grateful to be alive.

Shin also recalled seeing, while at school, a seven-year-old girl in his class being severely beaten because she was discovered to have picked up a few grains of wheat on the way to school. The beating continued for two hours, and her classmates had to carry her home. She died the next day.

In 2004, at the age of 22, Shin met a fellow prisoner who had seen life outside the camp. This prisoner described the wider world to Shin. Initially, Shin did not believe him. His entire life until then had been spent behind the barbed wire of the prison camp, and he thought that this was the extent of life. Eventually, the other prisoner convinced him, and Shin’s curiosity developed. Together, they decided to try to escape, and in 2005 they put their plan into action. What then followed is a story of agony and ecstasy. In a written testimony available on the internet, Shin recalls:

“I had no fear of being shot at or electrified; I knew I had to get out and nothing else mattered at that moment. I ran to the barbed wire. Suddenly, I felt a great pain as though someone was stabbing the sole of my foot when I passed through the wire. I almost fainted but, by instinct, I pushed myself forward through the fence. I looked around to find the barbed wire behind me but Park”—

his friend—

“was motionless hanging over the wire fence! At that desperate moment I could afford little thought of my poor friend and I was just overwhelmed by joy. The feeling of ecstasy to be out of the camp was beyond description. I ran down the mountain quite a way when I felt something wet on my legs. I was in fact bleeding from the wound inflicted by the barbed wire. I had no time to stop but sometime later found a locked house in the mountain. I broke into the house and found some food that I ate, then I left with a small supply of rice I found in the house. I sold the rice at the first mining village I found and bribed the border guards to let me through the North Korean border with China with the money from that rice.”

Shin described to us first seeing the country of North Korea outside the prison camps, and said that, to him, it looked like paradise.

Shin’s story will be published in March this year, in a book called “Escape from Camp 14”. I hope that many of us will read it. I am aware that the Minister met Shin, and I look forward to hearing his reflections on their discussions. The Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr Speaker also met Shin, and expressed what an impact that encounter had on them. Shin, however, is by no means the only North Korean defector to have spoken in Parliament; earlier this year, Kim Hye-sook addressed a meeting organised by the APPG. She spent 28 years in the North Korean prison camps, and was first jailed at the age of 13. Kim was forced to work in coal mines even as a child, and witnessed public executions.

What Shin Dong-hyuk and Kim Hye-sook have in common is that they were victims of North Korea’s appalling “guilt by association” policy, which punishes people for three generations for the alleged crimes of a family member. Kim’s grandfather had gone to South Korea during the Korean war, and for that reason her family were regarded as hostile elements by the regime, and jailed. According to lists of detainees, which I have been sent, many others in the camps are jailed for being Christian.

It is estimated that there are approximately 200,000 prisoners in such camps, and over the years human rights reports by organisations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Christian Solidarity Worldwide have catalogued stories from survivors of the camps, who testify to the widespread use of forced labour, executions, torture, rape, sexual violence, forced abortions, infanticide and religious persecution. One, Kim Wu-yeong, told CSW:

“Christianity is public enemy number one in North Korea. If someone is a Christian in North Korea they are a political enemy and will be either executed or sent away to a political prison camp.”

Further information can be found in the book “North Korea: a Case to Answer, a Call to Act”, published by CSW in 2007 and available on the internet.

One of the most remarkable books I have ever read is “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” by Barbara Demick. If hon. Members read just one book on North Korea, I would recommend this one. It is available from the Library and tells the life stories of several escapees from North Korea to South Korea—people who have not lived in prison camps, but who have none the less suffered greatly over the past several decades in many ways, in a country where freedom of speech and movement is minimal and malnutrition is commonplace. I remember reading and being so saddened by one mother’s story; I identified with her. In the 1990s, when there was a severe famine in the country, she was forced to search the countryside for grass and bark, which she would mash up and feed her family. Both her husband and her loved son died during that famine.

Despite the passing of that terrible famine, malnutrition still affects many millions of people who live in North Korea. The current humanitarian situation is dire and food aid is desperately needed. The World Food Programme and UNICEF conducted an assessment last year that shows that food needs are acute. The problem has continued over many years with such serious implications for growth that the North Korean army has, I understand, now reduced its height requirement for men from 4 feet 8 inches to 4 feet 3 inches. Our fellow men and women are living at this time, in the 21st century, when there is so much plenty in so many other countries, but they live in another part of the world with such shortages in a country that, as the book “Nothing to Envy” describes, was once a developing nation but is now going backwards. Compassion should surely move us to do all that we can to provide food aid and to support international aid agencies that are willing to help.

--- Later in debate ---

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, in a debate on a subject other than Europe. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) for securing the debate, and for the passionate and compassionate way in which she introduced it. Her speech was one of the most moving that I have heard this Parliament, and some of the points were very well made. The story she told of Shin Dong-hyuk was inspiring and horrifying in almost equal measure.

Many international comparisons have been made of the regime in North Korea. The hon. Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) said that it stood comparison with the Nazis, and the re-education and prison camps do indeed bear comparison with those under Hitler. In North Korea, there are disappearances, torture and violent repression, carried out with as much ruthless efficiency as there was under any of the old Latin American military dictatorships. We see there the “duce” ideology, as totalitarian and intolerant as that of the Khmer Rouge. The cult of personality is as extreme as that of Ceausescu or Bokassa. The reckless mismanagement of the food supply has caused a self-induced famine as devastating as that experienced by China during Mao’s terrible “great leap forward”. To those traditional state crimes can be added terrorist acts that bear comparison with those of al-Qaeda, abductions like those by Somali pirates, and a nuclear programme that is as threatening as anything in Iran.

That is an extraordinary list, and in many ways it probably adds up to the most completely ruthless dictatorship in modern history. That poses a bit of a problem for those trying to focus opposition, or to support those campaigning for any sort of freedom in North Korea. In Burma, attention can be focused on a figure such as Aung San Suu Kyi; in eastern Europe, there were figures such as Walesa and Václav Havel, and there was Nelson Mandela in South Africa, but their equivalents in North Korea were annihilated long ago, or imprisoned and forgotten. That poses a problem.

[Mr Buckland]

To reinforce the point that the hon. Gentleman is making so eloquently, the last special rapporteur of the UN Human Rights Council classified human rights abuses in North Korea as sui generis—that is, as a completely separate category from any other abuses in the world. The hon. Gentleman has encapsulated why the rapporteur’s findings were absolutely right.

[Martin Horwood]

The hon. Gentleman’s point is absolutely correct.

It is important to focus on the people who have managed, extraordinarily, to escape from the regime, such as Mr Shin. I am pleased that the Minister has met Mr Shin personally, and that the Government are taking seriously the views, opinions, testimony and witness of those who manage to escape from the regime.

The hon. Member for Congleton asked us to focus on humanitarian and human rights issues, and rightly drew attention to Baroness Amos’s report of her visit last year, which highlighted that, on the humanitarian front, there is chronic poverty, underdevelopment, poor infrastructure, and indicators of widespread malnutrition and stunted growth in the population. Daily diets are deficient even in basic protein and essential fats. Previous UN assessments of the food supply suggested that it was very poor, with poor management of land, and as the hon. Member for Congleton suggested, there is poor access to basic mechanical farm equipment. That seems extraordinary in the 21st century. Add to that a near total breakdown in the management of public health, and vulnerability to human trafficking and perhaps even the exploitation of children, in which agents of the state may be complicit, and the picture is truly apocalyptic.

The picture is little better on the human rights front. We have heard about the widespread use of torture and possibly rape, and certainly about the regime’s use of extrajudicial beatings, imprisonment and execution in the many prisons camps. There is persecution not just of what the regime deems to be criminal acts, but of wrong thinking in a souped-up version of the Maoist red guards’ worst excesses. There is absolutely no freedom of belief, of the press, of thought or of political expression.

That poses the problem for democratic Governments of how to deal with such regimes. How can influence be exercised over a regime that is so totally beyond the pale that it is, as the hon. Member for South Swindon suggested, almost in a class of its own? There are some avenues. There is the traditional diplomatic pressure that the Government exercise through diplomatic contact with the North Korean embassy here in this country, our embassy in North Korea, and the embassies of our European Union partners. Clearly, we should continue to use those channels. We should also continue the pressure to encourage North Korea to allow access for the UN special rapporteur on human rights. We should certainly support a commission of inquiry, but there is clearly a problem in the UN Security Council, and we may not be able to obtain widespread support, which seems incredible. If China and Russia are not minded to support that, it is a damning indictment of their foreign policy. I should be grateful to hear the Minister’s latest report of any discussions that he may have had on that front with Chinese and Russian colleagues, or the UK’s representation at the UN.

There is also an issue with refugees. Some 300,000 refugees have allegedly made their way from North Korea to China. Apart from the logistical and social problems that that might cause, if they are caught, they are apparently routinely repatriated to North Korea, where they face almost certain torture and execution. A few refugees seem to reach countries such as Vietnam, Laos and Mongolia. What discussions has the Minister had with China and other regional Governments, and organisations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, on the treatment of North Korean refugees and the protection of their human rights and their right to asylum, which are extraordinarily important in the current situation?

Beyond that, there is the exercise of what is traditionally called soft power. It is difficult to make humanitarian aid relationships conditional, and that seems a brutal and inhumane approach, but some conditionality or attempt to ensure that food aid gets to the right people and is not being used as a political tool is important. I should be interested to hear the Minister’s thoughts about his Department’s latest approach to that policy, and the approach taken by the Department for International Development.

The hon. Member for Congleton referred to the British Council and the language-teaching programme, which is a positive step. I should be interested to hear whether the Minister has any news about penetration of the BBC World Service or other language services into North Korea. I know that it is standard practice in North Korea to solder the tuning dial of radios, so that they can be tuned only to North Korean stations. The extraordinary levels to which the regime goes to try to repress its people are astonishing, although it does not require a mechanical or electrical genius to undo solder, so perhaps messages are getting through.

There are limits to soft power when a regime is totally unresponsive to that approach. We must try to find a means of exerting pressure. We could hope that a new regime and a new leader might lead to some change, but I think that may be as futile as the hope that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi or Bashar al-Assad would be a new influence on their countries. The likelihood is that, in reality, Kim Jong-un is much less influential in the exercise of power than even his father, and certainly his grandfather.

The key relationship in the region, and the only one that could make a material difference, is that between North Korea and China. China’s tacit tolerance of the appalling regime in North Korea is allowing it to survive, and it is crucial to emphasise to the Chinese that if they are to be players in international relations and participate responsibly as part of the international community, they cannot be seen to be complicit in the survival of such an appalling regime.

The kind of instability that I am sure the Chinese fear more than anything is a possibility in North Korea. As we have seen in north Africa and all over the world, repression leads in the end to a kind of instability. In an utterly dysfunctional society, a repressive regime will fall in one way or another, and it is surely better for that to happen through a process of international action and intervention than in a chaotic way that may cause instability on China’s doorstep. I would be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about any discussions he has had with China. As the hon. Member for Congleton has said, there is a moral case for not being tempted to forget and dismiss the situation in North Korea. Inaction is simply unacceptable in the face of such an appalling situation, and we should be grateful to the hon. Lady for pointing that out.