Korea Now

December 30, 2016

The dire human rights situation in North Korea raises questions about the country and the nature of the regime. This week, reports on mass executions and Pyongyang’s deployment of forced laborers overseas brought into sharp focus a few of the reasons why rights violations continue to prevail under Kim Jong Un. According to Seoul’s spy agency, the North Korean leader could have purged or killed 340 people, many of them senior government officials who had misgivings about how Kim commanded the country. Kim didn’t begin his rule in 2012 with mass purges, but over the last five years the number of people dismissed or killed increased exponentially as he sought to consolidate his power. It’s debatable whether the purges are a sign of strength or of weakness, but what we do know is that in the same time period Kim spent $300 million for weapons development, while spending another $180 million toward statues and monuments glorifying the ruling family. It’s also possible that some officials who disagreed with such hardline policies may have been sacrificed to serve as a warning to others. Kim set a goal of completing nuclear development by the end of 2017, according to Thae Yong Ho, a senior North Korean diplomat who defected to South Korea in August. Rights abuses also appear to be embedded into the economic structure of the regime, and in the case of North Korean forced laborers, worker exploitation continues because foreign governments, like Poland’s, either look the other way or choose a lax approach to enforcing sanctions. According to a South Korean television network, more than 100 North Korean women currently work at a tomato farm southwest of Warsaw, although Poland has stated North Korean workers were no longer being permitted to enter the country. International sanctions, however, have had some impact in other parts of the world. Oman recently repatriated all North Korean state workers, according to South Korea’s trade agency, a sign that more countries are wary of the presence of forced laborers within their borders