Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Earlier today I spoke briefly on the report which was tabled in the House by the honourable member for Fadden, on behalf of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, on the subject of Australia’s relations with the Republic of Korea and developments on the Korean peninsula. I raised some of the human rights issues created for Australia by the situation on the Korean peninsula, and I will return to those. I do not think any report by this parliament on the Korean peninsula can avoid the circumstances of the last few months with regard to missile tests from North Korea and, in general, the security and strategic situation affecting all of the people of North-East Asia.

I spoke in particular earlier about the dilemma of getting aid to the starving people of North Korea without strengthening the regime of the so-called Dear Leader, whose irrational policies are the reason that North Korea cannot feed itself. I spoke also about the situation of at least 100,000 Korean refugees in China who China refuses to recognise as refugees and who as a result cannot be helped by the UNHCR. Instead, these starving refugees face the risk of being sent back to North Korean labour camps—in many cases to certain execution. This further opportunity in the Main Committee will allow me to analyse some of the broader issues raised by the report relating to the security situation on the Korean peninsula and Australia’s possible role in finding a solution to the Korean impasse. The North Korean regime is a new phenomenon in the world. It is not just a dictatorship, not just a rogue regime and not just a failed state. It is a criminal regime, a regime which acts in a consciously and deliberately criminal manner, with the sole objective of keeping itself in power so that its leaders can live in corruption and luxury.

This is a regime which engages in corrupt and illegal currency transactions, as was recently shown in the Banco Delta Asia affair. One of the Macau casinos was the place where it was laundering all of this North Korean counterfeiting of other people’s currency. This false currency was deliberately printed by the sovereign government of another country—not by the Sopranos, not by some crooks, but by the government of another country deliberately and fraudently faking other country’s banknotes. North Korea was counterfeiting the money of other countries and laundering it through a Macau casino in order to have access to vast amounts of foreign currency. This regime in Pyongyang which has dealt drugs out of its embassies in Europe, which has tried to smuggle heroin into Australia, which has assassinated South Korean cabinet ministers and which has abducted dozens of people from Japan so they can be trained as spies—dozens of totally innocent people who might have been walking by the beach or been in a supermarket. They were just picked up by North Koreans and taken to that country completely against their will, never to be seen or heard of by their families.

While the Soviet bloc was still in existence it was assumed that North Korea was an orthodox communist regime, albeit a rather strange one with its bizarre personality cult of Kim Il Sung. It was assumed that when the Soviet Union collapsed North Korea would go the way of East Germany and Albania, in the dustbin of history, but instead the regime survived. It was assumed that when Kim Il Sung died the regime he had built would then collapse. But instead when the great leader finally passed on in 2004, power passed to his even more bizarre son Kim Jong Il, who has raised the regime to new heights of criminality. The most alarming aspect of Kim Jong Il’s regime over the past decade has been its determination to develop nuclear weapons, its defiance of the international community and its reckless acts in testing its missiles by firing them towards and over Japan. This is the obscenity of a country in which at least one million people starved to death during the great famine of the 1990s—a famine which was certainly aggravated by natural disasters but which was caused fundamentally by the regime’s own economic policies. So here we have a country in which a million people starved to death in the 1990s. We in Australia, this vast prosperous country, are close to it. This is a regime which is, at the same time, using every bit of revenue corruptly obtained from foreign currency counterfeiting and from selling drugs all around the world to develop nuclear weapons.

In 2000, Kim Jong Il assured the then US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, that the missile tests North Korea conducted in 1998 would be the last and that North Korea would participate in multinational talks to work towards a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. He gave similar promises to the then South Korean President, Kim Dae-jung, in response to South Korea’s ‘Sunshine Policy’, a well-intentioned—some would say futile—attempt to get North Korea to behave like a responsible member of the international community. But I must say that I understand the South Koreans. They opened up towards North Korea, they tried to engage them economically, and it was not clear at the time that this was a futile policy. It was done with good intent and we have to give the South Koreans credit for that.

Unfortunately, North Korea instead pressed ahead in secret with the development of nuclear weapons, pocketing the various bribes given to it by the US, Japan, China and South Korea as rewards for its promises of good behaviour. No-one who is familiar with North Korea believes that Kim Jong Il had the slightest intention of keeping the promises he gave to Secretary Albright or to the South Korean President.

As Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in the Wall Street Journal in July:

Plainly put, North Korea’s survival strategy is a policy of international military extortion. North Korea’s rulers have concluded that it is safest to finance the survival of their state through the international export of strategic insecurity and military menace. Consequently, the leadership, as a matter of course, strives to generate sufficiently grave international tensions, and present sufficiently credible security threats, to wrest a flow of essentially coerced transfers from neighbours and other international targets sufficient in volume to assure the continuation of what Pyongyang describes—

monstrously—

as “our own style of socialism”.

To date, Pyongyang’s predatory security strategy has actually worked rather well.

After all, the DPRK, unlike so many other communist regimes, has neither vanished from the face of the earth nor compromised its claim to totalitarianism. I say that as a person who has a long record of opposition to communism but who can distinguish between the realistic form of it practised in China, just across the North Korean border, and the monstrous injustices that are being done in North Korea. In my view, the security crisis in North Korea cannot be resolved without addressing the heart of the problem: the terrible crimes the North Korean regime is committing against its own people—and there is an axiomatic link between North Korea’s reckless external behaviour and the ruthless character of its role.

My friend Carl Gershman, the Chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy, who was here in Australia today, argued in the Washington Post in 2003 that the government in North Korea is fully aware of the famine—so much so, that it deliberately uses it as a weapon against parts of the population that are classified as least loyal. It is estimated that, in the system of political prisons and labour camps in North Korea, 200,000 people are being held at the moment and that in the last decade 400,000 prisoners have perished in the harsh conditions of the camps. In keeping with the dictate of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, that class enemies ‘must be eliminated through three generations’, parents, children, grandchildren and other relatives are sent to the camps. In December 2002 the Far Eastern Economic Review published a satellite photo of one of these camps, in Haengyong county, which holds 50,000 prisoners who are regularly tortured and executed. It will one day probably become as infamous as some of the concentration camps in Cambodia or Germany.

In negotiations with the South Korean regime, prudence and simple morality demand that any agreement should include measures to protect the refugees that I have talked about and measures to end the famine. I believe that the proposals of the current South Korean government—some of the arguments recently made by the South Korean foreign minister—and a resolution that is before the US congress neatly mix this concern with security and human rights. We have to remember that one of the great developments in Europe in the 1990s was the Helsinki agreements. A Helsinki agreement for the Korean peninsula would end the silence on North Korean human rights abuses, increase international pressure on the regime and commit the signatories to a different vision of North Korea from what now exists. It may not ultimately liberate the North Korean people from the terrible crimes that are being committed against them, but we thought the same in eastern Europe. I believe that Helsinki agreements for North-East Asia, particularly for the Korean peninsula, would be a very good development towards the end of the liberation of the persecuted people of North Korea.

Debate (on motion by Mrs Gash) adjourned.