Help an Idiot
19 June, 2009
And, as it happens, I'm only posting now because I need some help. I'm working on a short research paper right now - to be submitted sometime in the next ten days or so - about House Resolution 4011, which was originally passed in 2004 by the United States Congress and renewed in 2008. For those of you not hip to the legislative lingo, this bill was better known as the North Korean Human Rights Act and was designed, as Wikipedia will tell you, to make it easier for the United States to help North Korean refugees, including by granting them asylum in the United States.
Sounds like a perfectly noble piece of legislation, right? But why do it? After all, China has long been opposed to encouraging defection from North Korea (see video above), and South Korea - the constitution of which grants citizenship to any North Korean reaching its shores - has until recently been loath to criticize North Korea's human rights record or to encourage defection by North Koreans. Indeed, the then-ruling Uri Party, as well as numerous other liberal groups, were quick to criticize the bill, claiming that it would do more to harm relations between the two Koreas than it would actually help refugees.
This very issue has been on people's minds this week as South Korean president Lee Myung-bak traveled to Washington to meet with President Obama, a meeting which many hoped would include discussions of the human rights issue. Paul Wolfowitz, writing this week in the Wall Street Journal, gives this description of the South Korean and Chinese position:
Both China and South Korea are afraid of revolutionary change in North Korea, even though both would welcome a "modernizing" evolution. They recall the flow of refugees from East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the East German government and worry about a repeat of these events in North Korea. But the German refugee flow was a consequence of the weakening grip of the communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. It was not the cause of that weakness. A more relevant example for the North Korean case is Vietnam, where the departure of refugees did nothing to weaken the regime and may even have stabilized it.
Reluctance to antagonize North Korea has been another reason for inaction. Under President Lee's predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun, this tendency was so extreme that in 2007 South Korea abstained from a United Nations vote condemning North Korean human-rights violations. President Lee's administration has reversed that embarrassing policy, but South Korean officials remain concerned about North Korea's reactions to even the mildest criticisms. Unfortunately, many U.S. government officials seem equally reluctant to do anything that might jeopardize negotiations with North Korea.
Wolfowitz goes on to point out that, since the passing of the North Korean Human Rights Act, the United States has only accepted 81 refugees from North Korea, even as South Korea has accepted 2,809 since Lee Myung-bak took office sixteen months ago.
My question, then, is why would the U.S. Congress actively antagonize the South Koreans and Chinese - whose help is sorely needed in resolving the North Korean nuclear issue - if the U.S. government is either unwilling or unable to take the lead in a substantial refugee resettlement program as it did with Indochinese refugees in the late 1970s and early 1980s? Additionally, I remain unclear as to why this act was necessary given the pre-existence of the 1980 Refugee Act, under which, I believe, six North Koreans were admitted to the U.S. in 2006.
There is additionally, a security concern in all of this. As Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland note here (p. 47), some fear that North Korea may try to infiltrate spies into the United States via the refugee line, which is another reason that it is difficult for North Koreans (as well as Palestinians and Libyans) to receive refugee asylum in the United States.
I'm especially curious about the institutional momentum behind and reaction to this bill. Senator Sam Brownback and Representative Jim Leach were both active in the bill's passage, but I'd like to get a better understanding of how the bill was perceived in, say, the State Department (particularly by those negotiators, such as Christopher Hill, who were working on the Six Party Talks). What were the involved parties hoping to accomplish with this bill and how, if at all, has it factored into subsequent affairs on the Korean peninsula?
As far as I can tell, there hasn't been much written on this particular matter and I'd thus appreciate it if those of you with knowledge, opinions, or wild guesses would leave any ideas or links in the comments section.
Thanks.
