ORDINARY NORTH KOREANS
North Koreans' lives are characterized by "feelings of helplessness, isolation and fear." There is no social trust and informers are everywhere. Citizens are forced to humiliate themselves by regurgitating ridiculous propaganda, "the more ridiculous the lie, the better." "Recently arrived refugees say that North Koreans already know their government is built on lies." Urquhart's overall notion of DPRK society reads more like the fictional dystopia of Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son than the serious literature on the country.
WC is accused of failing to incorporate everyday North Koreans and silencing alternative narratives. Both assertions are dubious. It was impossible to assemble a representative sample where anyone selected is already disqualified due to their having been selected.
Evidence of "silencing" is found in WC's failure to immediately accommodate a well-known defector, Lee Aeran, in voicing her anti-engagement position. Urquhart does not mention that ROK police had warned Christine Ahn that men were present who might try to harm her, and protesters were using plainly intimidating slogans. This was not an atmosphere where it is easy to be welcoming of outbursts of dissent.
Yet when Lee, registered under a false name, started speaking at them, she was given a microphone and allowed plenty of time to speak. "Sister, we are not your enemy," Nobel Laureate Leymah Gbowee said. WC delegates embraced her.
Urquhart accuses WC of inviting only "token" Koreans who do not represent the general population. He asks us a crucial question: how many "others still trapped in North Korea would echo" Lee Aeran's sentiments? It appears Urquhart believes the lives of typical North Koreans (and Iraqis) can be derived from the most extreme refugee narratives of repression and suffering. "North Korean people have precisely one enemy: their government," he writes.
Urquhart acknowledges the Kim government is loved by a small portion of the population and compares this to how surviving Baathists created the Islamic State. This implies regime supporters are a tiny majority of brutal villains and -- even more dangerous -- ordinary North Koreans agree with this conception.
Normalization "isn't just regressive," it is "unnecessary," Urquhart claims: DPRK power structures are already "crumbling." John Feffer terms this thinking "collapsism." While there was a reasonable possibility of state or regime collapse during the the mid-late 1990s famine, the case for this today is much less persuasive, as Henri Feron has shown. It is profoundly unethical to discredit peace activism and justify indefinite perpetuation of the status quo on these grounds.
Urquhart believes WC is "re-victimiz(ing) refugees by pretending they don't exist" even as he equates loyalists to ISIS fighters and explicitly justifies the perpetuation of militarism and sanctions. His words are apt here: "This wishful thinking has an ugly human cost. It ignores the lived realities of North Koreans."
NORMALIZATION AS PROGRESSIVE AND NECESSARY
Urquhart cites Lee Aeran arguing the real obstacles to peace are DPRK nuclear weapons, missiles and brutality. An obvious question arises: How can any peace treaty be justified if the existence of weapons and human rights violations on the other side disqualifies engagement?
He endorses "Separative Engagement" as an ethical "peace program." This skeletal policy paper advocates separating (read: alienating) the DPRK people from the government. The text rejects any "approaches proposed, crafted, or condoned by the DPRK regime" and any engagement that has only "minor results relative to the immense scale of human rights violations." "Peace" is not even mentioned. The clear unstated purpose of this paper is to militate against peace.
There is no reason to believe peace and economic opening would prolong the existence of the North Korean government. On the contrary, it poses a profound challenge to DPRK institutions. The state of war helps the DPRK justify repression, militarism, controls on foreign media, lack of development, state control over food and key industries and so on. It perpetuates its ideological self-identity as a victim of outsiders.
Peace would also likely sew deep divisions in the elite. Those who become rich may act against the interests of regime survival if it benefits them. A hostile external environment, on the other hand, empowers anti-engagement stakeholders against potential reformers in the DPRK.
Finally, development empowers North Koreans against their government. All the seminal liberal authorities on revolution -- Barrington Moore, Samuel Huntington, Theda Skocpol -- see economic modernization as a central cause of revolutionary upheaval.
Divorcing the U.S./South Korean military threat from DPRK human rights violations in order to mobilize the latter against engagement is unethical and propagandistic. It serves the political and economic interests of the beneficiaries of militarism rather than the interests of ordinary North Koreans. If critics disagree, they should provide real evidence rather than the ideological moralism, denigration and aversion on display in critiques of WC.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
