Least Surprising News of the Day
From the Chosun:
North Korea used political prisoners from a concentration camp to prepare for its underground nuclear test on Oct. 9 last year, a federation of North Korean refugee organizations in South Korea alleged Monday. In a briefing in Seoul co-sponsored by the U.S. rights watchdog Freedom House, the Committee for Democratization of North Korea said it has testimony that North Korea was able to keep its nuclear test secret even from citizens because it used prisoners from a concentration camp in Hwaseong, North Hamgyeong Province.
Not that Amnesty International or other major human rights groups really care.Â
> Not that Amnesty International or other major
> human rights groups really care.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=3A85FB1…
http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/prk-summary-eng
New Amnesty report comes out tomorrow.
NK like all totalitarian regimes knows all too well that even human rights groups aren't exempt from the rule "What you can't see can't hurt/disturb you."
Haisan,
Your links just proved what I was saying. One link is to the famine of the 90's and the other is from 2004. Nothing about what is going on now. I checked their website before I put the post up and of course you can find a wealth of Darfur and Gitmo stuff right on the front page.
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR510322…
http://web.amnesty.org/pages/sdn-080507-news-eng
The 90's famine memo was good because they probably cared more then because the NK famine received more media attention. The 2004 memo on the site is nothing more than a CYA memo just like other memos they have done on NK. I believe a strong case can be made that Amnesty International spends more resources and money publicizing issues they can make money off of from their big money donors. That is why they continuously hype Gitmo and Darfur when far worse is going on in North Korea. Heck they even have infiltrated the US military with plants for political purposes.
http://rokdrop.com/2007/03/04/exposing-the-gi-fif…
There is no money to made with NK so just release a memo every once a while for CYA purposes.
Unfortunately for the people of North Korea they are going to have to continue to rely on groups like LINK and the Christian groups in China to help them. The big human rights organizations are to morally bankrupt to help.
The apparent coequal status of Gitmo and Darfur among Amnesty's agendas is telling in itself. Darfur is a real genocide with a death count to date in the hundreds of thousands. And this is comparable to Gitmo how?? A memo here or there on NK is the very least one could expect from the most prominent human rights group on the very worst ongoing human rights disaster in the world.
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The 2004 link was for a report then. The 2006 report, issued yesterday, takes NK to task for all its current crap: http://web.amnesty.org/report2006/prk-summary-eng
The whole point of Amnesty is to pressure governments into improving their actions by publicizing their rights abuses. NK has shown itself to be pretty immune to outside opinion (although Amnesty did carry out an urgent action campaign against NK in February). There were many reports and NK-related things in 2004, but not much in 2005 and 2006 (http://web.amnesty.org/library/eng-prk/index). So if you want to say NK is not an Amnesty priority, I would agree with that.
The report is very weak. You can get more out of the wikipedia article on NK human rights abuses. You can get a lot more info from the One Free Korea archives for 2006.
The entire report on North Korean human rights abuses was shorter than just the Gitmo section of the USA report.
http://web.amnesty.org/report2006/usa-summary-eng
Look at how many more words are in bold in the US report compared to the NK report.
If Amnesty International is supposed to pressure governments they are doing nothing in regards to North Korea. Why isn't Amnesty International trying to get people on CNN to condemn North Korean human rights when they so easily get people on the news networks to condemn Gitmo? Why aren't they sending people to China to help the Christian groups and grassroots NK human rights groups instead of infiltrating the US military?
I wouldn't have a problem with them if they would quit calling themselves a human rights organization and call themselves a political organization instead.
[…] Can we really separate nukes from human rights? North Korean defectors say that the regime used political prisoners to help prepare its nuclear test. The report is given plausibility by the proximity of the […]
[…] Korea has also used political prisoners from a concentration camp to prepare for its underground nuclear test h/t One Free […]