THE MIRROR OF NORTH KOREAN HUMAN RIGHTS

ABSTRACT

Turning on the logic of the spectacle, U.S.-based campaigns on North Korean human rights, in calling for intervention, have wielded two images aimed at outing North Korea's “hidden truths”? the image of the starving child circa the 1990s and the contemporary satellite image of what appear to be labor camps. Focusing on the use of online virtual geo-imagery programs like Google Earth in the human rights mapping of North Korea, this essay situates post-9/11 “liberation technology” within the framework of the unending Korean War, a war whose failed “liberation” of Korea from the global forces of communism haunts North Korean human rights critique today. By examining mid-century bomber photographs and contemporary human rights satellite images of North Korea, this essay inquires into the homology between technologies of militarized intelligence and war, on the one hand, and technologies of human rights that aim to expose North Korea, on the other. Both modes of apperception, this essay argues, strive to delegitimize and destroy rather than faithfully represent the enemy.

Notes

²As he details in his memoir, David Frum, former economic speechwriter for George W Bush, conceived of the phrase “axis of hatred” in response to a request that he “sum up in a sentence or two our best case for going after Iraq.” Revising the phrase “axis ofhatred” as “axis of evil” to bring the expression in line with Bush's signature “theological” rhetoric, Frum states that “North Koreawas added to the axis last? it was attempting to develop nuclearweapons, it had a history of reckless aggression, and it too had been cosseted by the United States in the recent past and needed to feel a stronger hand.” Meant to justify a preemptive strike, the coinage “axis of evil” reflected the belief that “[t]he United States could not wait for these dangerous regimes to get deadlyweapons and attack us? the United States must strike first and protect the world from them.” See Frum 2003, 224, 238, 236.

³Bush 2002.

⁴Ibid.

⁵Ibid.John Feffer offers this rejoinder to the human rights charge that the North Korean government willfully starved its people? “The suggestion was that the persistent food shortages experience by North Korea during this period were a human rightsviolation rather than the result of systemic breakdown. But there is no credible evidence that Pyongyang has used famine as a weapon against the Korean people … ?If the regime had intended to use famine as a political weapon—as the Soviet Union did to put down agrarian resistance in Ukraine in the 1930s—it is not likely that it would have undermined its own doctrine of self-reliance and risked opening up the country to outside ideas by asking the United Nations and other nongovernmental agencies to set up offices in Pyongyang and to travel throughout the country.” See Feffer 2004, 38.

⁶Bush 2002.

⁷Scholte quoted in Lee 2011.

⁸ Hallett 2006, 77.At a23December 2002 Pentagon press briefing, a reporter pressed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the possibility of a two-front “war against terror, Iraq and North Korea at the same time.” Rumsfeld offered the following terse response? “We are capable of fighting two major regional conflicts, as the national strategy and the force-sizing construct clearlyindicates. We're capable ofwinning decisively in one and swiftly defeating in the case of the other. And let there be no doubt about it.” See Pentagon Briefing 2002.

⁹Hallett 2006, 73.

¹⁰Feffer 2004, 34. Similar legislation targeted Libya, Cuba, and Burma.

¹¹As Feffer writes, “With some exceptions, the push to improve human rights in North Korea is being placed against, rather than within, an engagement framework. This is because the real goal is regime changeSee ibid., 37, emphasis added.

¹²In “God's Senator,”Jeff Sharlet describes the passage of the North Korean Human RightsAct of 2004 as a victory for the Helsinki Commission under then-Senator Sam Brownback's leadership. The legislation “establishe[d] a confrontational stance toward the dictatorial regime and shifts funds for humanitarian aid from the United Nations to Christian organizations”—a process which SeanWoo, former general counsel to Brownback and Helsinki Commission chief of staff, called “privatizing democracy.” See Sharlet 2006, 56.

¹³Rios 2003, 37.

¹⁴The IraqWarwas, asJames Bamfordwrites, “the firstwarbased almost entirelyonacovert propaganda campaign targeting the media. … Never before in history had such an extensive secret network been established to shape the entire world's perception of awar. ‘It was not just bad intelligence—it was an orchestrated effort,’ says Sam Gardner, a retired Air Force colonel who has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College. ‘It began before the war, was a major effort during the war and continues as post-conflict distortions.’” See Bamford 2005.

¹⁵See Meister 2011, 5.

¹⁶Brown 2004, 253. On the Strangelove-ian turn of NKHR agitators, consider, for example, the “Eclipse Policy” of prominent defector, Kang Chol-hwan. “In 1998, we nearly witnessed the collapse of the Kim Jong Il regime as three million people died of hunger,” Kang stated in a 2005 Wall StreetJournal op-ed, “Give Us an ‘Eclipse Policy.’” Describing the Arduous March, the cataclysmic famine that ravaged North Korea in the mid-to-late 1990s (when Kang had already relocated to South Korea), as a time in which “[b]odies lined the streets, malnutrition caused cutbacks in military exercises, and an energy shortage” affected all regions and social strata, Kang offered an impassioned case against U.S. humanitarian food to its historic enemy Urging his American readers to understand the catastrophe that North Koreans faced in the 1990s as an optimistic time when “[t]he North Korean people finally had some hope … for regime change,” much as “the darkest moment of the night is before the dawn,” Kang advocated the steadfast resolve ofthe U.S. State Department “in resisting callsbyMr. Roh's government in Seoul to give aid to North Korea.” See Kang 2005.

¹⁷7. Hong 2008.

¹⁸8. Ibid.

¹⁹9. Brown 2004, 452.

²⁰Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 353.

²¹Ibid., 417.

²²Virilio 1989, 4.

²³Williams 2010, 44, emphasis in original.

²⁴Ibid.

²⁵Similarly, Bernd Huppauf argues that the camera, within a context of war, does not simply serve a recording function. Rather, war is “no longer the mere object of the lens” and beyond the context of battle itself, war “reconstitute[s] the very position of the camera and photographic process within reality.” See Huppauf 1993, 54.

²⁶Mbembe 2003, 38.

²⁷Douzinas 2007, 68.

²⁸Ranciere 2004, 308.

²⁹Ibid.

³⁰Meister 2011, ix, 6, emphasis in original.

³¹Ranciere writes, “The expression ‘infinite justice’was dismissed bythe U.S. government a few days after having been put forward as an inappropriate term. ButIthink that it was fairly appropriate. An infinite justice is not only a justice that dismisses the principles ofInternational Law, prohibiting interference in the ‘internal affairs’ of another state? it is ajustice which erases all the distinctions that used to define the field of justice in general? the distinctions between law and fact, legal punishment and private retaliation, justice, police, and war. All those distinctions are boiled down to a sheer ethical conflict between Good and Evil.” See Ranciere 2004, 309.

³²It should be noted that Bush did not explicitly invoke “human rights” as an operative phrase in his State of the Union address, though it appeared as a rationale in the Iraq Resolution, which described Iraq as “a regime that developed and used weapons of mass destruction, that harbored and supported terrorists, committed outrageous human rights abuses, and defied the just demands of the United Nations and the world.” See Bush 2002.

³³Ibid.

³⁴iizek 2005, 115.

³⁵AsArun Kundnani writes, “full spectrum dominance,” or “the ability ofUS forces to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations,” was introduced as the key term in the Department of Defense'sJoint Vision 2020 planning document published in June 2000.” See Kundnani 2004, 125.

³⁶Strong 1949. On the controversy over the start date of the Korean War, Marilyn Young notes: “The usual dating of the Korean war [sic] takes the day North Korean tanks and troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, 25June 1950, as its inception. But war in Korea had already been underway for almost five years, a bitter, intense, civil conflict of cross-border attacks, violent political repression, peasant rebellion and its armed suppression.” See Young 2001, 113.

³⁷Harlan 2010.

³⁸Conrad 2006, 5.

³⁹Quoted in Oberdorfer 2001, 60.

⁴⁰U.S. Department of Defense 2002. Barbara Demick, in her much-lauded book Nothing to Envy? Ordinary Lives in North Korea, reproduces this image at the commencement ofherfirst chapter as well as the familiar intelligence cliches about North Korea, which she refers to—in the scope of two short opening paragraphs—as “a large splotch curiously lacking in light,” a “mysterious black hole,” “simplyablank,” “an expanse ofdarkness,” and the “areaofdarkness that is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.” See Demick 2010, 3, 4.

⁴¹Carr 2010, 29. See, also, Ros-Lehtinen 2012.

⁴²Watanabe 1997,46. One of the cognitive pitfalls of mIrror imaging, according to LaurenWitlin, is that it enables “an analyst [who] lacks information … to fill in any informational gaps.” Witlin remarks that “impos[ition of] personal perspective and cultural background on incomplete data … frequently results in gross distortions of intelligence and raw data, forcing the information into a framework for which it may not be suited.” See Witlin 2008, 90, 89.

⁴³As Loch Johnson writes? “The question of their relative merit aside for the moment, it should be understood that spies overseas can be enormously difficult to recruit in closed societies like Iran and North Korea, which possess effective counterespionage and security defenses. Before the United States invaded Iraq the first time in 1990, for example, the CIAhad onlyfour human assets in that closed society.” See Johnson 2010, 325.

⁴⁴See, for example, Kim andJaffe 2010, 24? “In the course of its sixty-year history, the southern part of the Korean peninsula has grown by breathtaking leaps, seemingly becoming younger and stronger with every passing year. Meanwhile, a mirror country hidden in the attic regions of the peninsula—^one that few people have ever visited—grows older, crueler, and more frail at the pace. Yet it refuses to succumb.” See also Suh 2007, 158? “In launching its nuclear program, Pyongyang may have believed that it took an inherently defensive measure because it was facing what it believed to be an undoubtedly aggressive opponent in the United States. Its action was in turn seen as aggressive by the U.S.-Korea alliance,which held a mirror image set of the identities? the United States and South Korea as status quo states, and North Korea as aggressive.”

⁴⁵By “securitized,” IfollowHazel Smith's definition of the dominant media perspective and policy approach to North Korea, which is “curiously old-fashioned in its reliance upon the use and potential ofmilitaryforce as the central analytical notion in foreign policybehavior.” See Smith 2000, 593.

⁴⁶Snyder 1999, 238.

⁴⁷Brownback 2008.

⁴⁸Ibid.

⁴⁹Hong 2011.

⁵⁰Horn 2003, 73.

⁵¹Choe 2010.

⁵²Ibid.

⁵³Digital Activism n.d. According to the blog “North Korea Tech,” Koryolink, a cellular service provider in North Korea, was nearing 2 million subscribers as ofApril 2013. SeeWilliams 2013.

⁵⁴Diamond 2010, 70.

⁵⁵Ibid., 82.

⁵⁶Haggard and Noland 2011, 101. In 20 September 2011 testimony before Congress, Suzanne Scholte gives an account of liberation technology at work in North Korea? “Despite Kim Jong-il's best efforts to literally keep North Koreans ‘in the dark’ and isolated from the rest of the world, up to 60 percent of North Koreans have access to some form of information beyond the regime's propaganda. They are no longer isolated and are increasingly learning the reality that the source of their misery is not America or South Korea, but the source of their misery is Kim Jong il [sic] and the elites of his regime. North Korean defectors are sending remittances to their families in North Korea, helping them to survive which also demonstrates the prosperity in South Korea. North Korea now has a cell phone system with 500,000 subscribers according to Orascom Telecom and although you cannot call from South Korea, defectors are paying brokers in China to contact their families in North Korea. We also see the defectors getting information into North Korea from DVDs, VCDs, and USBs through China and other creative means such as balloon launches. In fact, North Koreans are keeping up with South Korean soap operas and watching many South Korean as well as Western films especially the elites.” See Scholte 2011. Similarly, Adrian Hong writes, “To help promote change within the country and refugee outflows, funding for radio broadcasts and other communications into North Korea must be improved from the current tragic lows. Beefing up efforts to support external communication to, from, and among the North Koreans would be a critical blow to Pyongyang's control, enabling citizens to organize themselves.” See Hong 2011. Nat Kretchun andJane Kim, inastudybased on defector interviews and surveys, offeracounter: “There does not appear to be a measurable direct relationship between exposure to outside media and North Koreans' beliefs and attitudes about their own regime.” See Kretchun and Kim 2012, 33.

⁵⁷Harris 2006, 117.

⁵⁸Brownback 2008.

⁵⁹Ramstad 2009.

⁶⁰See Anderson 1991, 170-78.

⁶¹Benjamin 2002, 236.

⁶²Horn 2003, 73.

⁶³Quoted in Ramstad 2009. On plagiarism charges, see Stanton 2010.

⁶⁴Meister 2011, 233.

⁶⁵Stanton n.d. (North Korea).

⁶⁶Ibid.

⁶⁷Conrad 2006, 8.

⁶⁸Ibid., 6.

⁶⁹Kracauer 1995, 77.

⁷⁰Stanton n.d. (North Korea).

⁷¹As Stanton asserts, as “anyone who has ever worked on a ranch know[s,] … barbed wire fences … run in straight line segments.” Since camps must have barbed wire and the satellite image of the compound he chances upon has straight fence-lines, it stands to reason—according to Stanton—that what he has found is a labor camp. See Stanton n.d. (Camp 25). Ibid.

⁷²Ibid.

⁷³Ibid.

⁷⁴Ibid., emphasis added.

⁷⁵Ibid.

⁷⁶Ibid. It is also worth noting that Camp 25 now has its own Wikipedia page.

⁷⁷Dillon 2007, 12.

⁷⁸Ibid.

⁷⁹Ramstad 2009? Harris 2006, 119.

⁸⁰Kundnani 2004, 123.

⁸¹Ibid., 118.

⁸²Ibid.

⁸³Consider David Harvey's critique of information technology as “the privileged technology of neoliberalism.” See Harvey 2005, 159. On the military origins of the internet as a distributed communications network meant to survive a nuclear attack, see Abbate 2000.

⁸⁴Harris 2006, 106.

⁸⁵Horn 2003, 73.

⁸⁶Žižek, as quoted in Wright 2004.

⁸⁷Ham 2012. On the “pivot” to Asia, see Clinton 2011. See also Bumiller 2011.

⁸⁸Of the significance ofthe 2012 exercises, which were lengthened to nearlytwo months following KimJong Eun's succession and denounced by North Korea as a “silent declaration ofwar,” Eighth Army Operational Chief of Staff, Major General Eldon Regua stressed the heightened strategic importance of the U.S.-South Korea alliance given “the shift in the U.S. military's focus … to the Asia Pacific region,” stating, “We continue to stand side-by-side with our ROK allies defending liberty on Freedom's Frontier and providing security in this vital region of the world.” On North Korea's response, see North Korea 2012. On Eldon Regua's remarks about the joint exercises, see Ham 2012.

⁸⁹Rowland 2010.

⁹⁰Lopez 2008, emphasis added.

⁹¹See Rabiroff and Chang 2012.

⁹²S. Korea 2012.

⁹³Ibid.

⁹⁴In 2008, the Korean CentralNewsAgency, North Korea's official news organ, offered the following critique ofthe Key Resolve/Foal Eagle exercises? “Peace and warcan never go together.” See Provocative War Maneuvers 2008.

⁹⁵Rabiroff 2012.

⁹⁶Kenneth Cmiel, as quoted in Douzinas 2007, 76.

⁹⁷In an excellent recent article on the geopolitics of satellite vision toward North Korea (published after this essay was researched and drafted) David Shim argues that even as the technology of remote sensing purportedly discloses 'the truth' about North Korea, it ‘is not an innocent mode of representation but is rather open to political appropriation and manipulation.” See Shim 2012, 10.

⁹⁸As John Fefferwrites? “Prohibited by law from lobbying Congress, the committee [U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea] has brought its influence to bear in other ways—for example, by sponsoring the influential 2003 report on North Korean human rights by former Amnesty International director David Hawk. The report integrated disparate defector accounts, showed satellite photos of labor camps, and attempted to quantify the scale of abuses in North Korea? it received considerable media attention and contributed to the shaping of the current legislation.” See Feffer 2004, 36.

⁹⁹Indeed, the report would serve as the subject ofa4 November 2003 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing that would go by the virtually same title, namely, “The Hidden Gulag: Putting Human Rights on the North Korea Policy Agenda,” sponsored by then-senator Brownback. See S. Hrg. 2003,108-404. On the U.S. State Department's reliance on Hawk's report, see Turner 2009.

¹⁰⁰Hawk 2012, 46.

¹⁰¹Hong2011. Hawkfurther admits that in some cases, “the description of a particular camp or facility rested on the testimony of one former prisoner. In those cases, I had to rely on the coherence and internal consistency of the testimony, and my professional experience.” See Hawk 2012, 15.

¹⁰²S. Hrg. 2003, 108-404.

¹⁰³Ibid.

¹⁰⁴Hawk 2012, ix.

¹⁰⁵McKinzie 2003, 88. Here, it should be noted that of the roughly 23,200 North Koreans who resettled in South Korea and the United States following the 1990s' famine, 27 are deemed “eyewitnesses from the labor camps” (in NKHR discourse, “eyewitness” is a category compassing former guards and former prisoners, with no perpetrator/victim distinction). Ministry of Unification 2012. See Hardin 2012, 14.

¹⁰⁶Harris 2006, 106.

¹⁰⁷S. Hrg. 2003, 50. In his brief insert-essay, Matthew McKinzie of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental NGO, nowhere describes NRDC's larger project. See McKinzie 2003, 88.

¹⁰⁸Cochran and McKinzie 2005, 16.

¹¹⁰Ibid., 21.

¹¹¹Cochran and McKinzie 2004, 7.

¹¹²Johnson 2010, 329.

¹¹³Ibid., 309.

¹¹⁴Weizman 2002.

¹¹⁵Ibid.

¹¹⁶Ibid.

¹¹⁷Harris 2006, 117.

¹¹⁸Elich 2013.

¹¹⁹Ibid.

¹²⁰Chow 2006, 31.

¹²¹Mbembe 2003, 28.

¹²²Harris 2006, 118, emphasis in original.

¹²³Gregory 201, 272.

¹²⁴Ibid., 274.

¹²⁵Carr 2010, 27.

¹²⁶Ibid.

¹²⁷Harris 2006, 101.

¹²⁸Ibid., 102, 104.

¹²⁹Gregory 2011, 266-67.

¹³⁰Ibid., 269. On geopolitics and biopolitics as two discursive configurations of security, see Dillon 2007.

¹³¹Lindqvist 2000, 127.

¹³²Ibid.

¹³³Ibid.

¹³⁴Thompson 1951, 54.

¹³⁵Cumings 1998, 57.

¹³⁶Thompson 1951, 39.

¹³⁷Quoted in Cumings 1998, 61.

¹³⁸McDonald 1991, 16–17.

¹³⁹Lindqvist 2000, 127.

¹⁴⁰Felton 1951, 6.

¹⁴¹Ibid.

¹⁴²Cumings 1998, 57.

¹⁴³Ibid.

¹⁴⁴Johnson 2000, 11–12.

¹⁴⁵Cumings 2011, 229.

¹⁴⁶Cumings 1992, 215.

¹⁴⁷Lindqvist 2000, 84.

¹⁴⁸Selden 1995.

¹⁴⁹See Cumings 2011, 160.

¹⁵⁰DPRK Foreign Ministry 2000.

¹⁵¹Ibid.

¹⁵²Ibid.

¹⁵³Ibid.

¹⁵⁴Ibid.

¹⁵⁵Ibid.

¹⁵⁶Williams 2011, 9.

¹⁵⁷Douzinas 2007, 71, 73, 75.