By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, Sunday Review, June 10, 2018<\/p>\n
As President Trump prepares to meet Kim Jong-un in Singapore, the focus is rightly on nuclear weapons. But let\u2019s not forget something else: North Korea is by far the most totalitarian country in the world.<\/p>\n
Trump should make clear to Kim that what makes a nation \u201cmodern\u201d is not just McDonald\u2019s franchises, but also an end to torture and a measure of freedom.<\/p>\n
A United Nations report on North Korea<\/a> in 2014 described \u201csystematic, widespread and gross human rights violations\u201d and added that in this respect North Korea \u201cdoes not have any parallel in the contemporary world.\u201d<\/p>\n North Koreans have told me how the police periodically turn off all the power in an apartment building, thus locking any video or DVD inside the machine playing it. Then the police search unit by unit to see what is in the machines \u2014 and if it is, say, a South Korean soap opera, then the entire family may be shuttled off to a labor camp.<\/p>\n No other country has managed to use technology, propaganda and the police to control a people so tightly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n On my visits to North Korea beginning in 1989, I\u2019ve been flabbergasted that each home had The Loudspeaker on a wall (in the villages I visited, The Loudspeaker was mounted on poles and shared by several homes). The Loudspeakers issued constant propaganda<\/a> along the lines of:<\/p>\n On his first golf outing, the <\/em>supreme leader shot five holes in one<\/em><\/a>, not long after scoring a perfect 300 his first time bowling! The brigandish American war-maniacs are committing ever increasing crimes with their despicable flunkeyist puppet traitors in South Korea. <\/em>A magical white sea cucumber<\/em><\/a>threw itself into a fisherman\u2019s net to celebrate the wise rule of the Workers\u2019 Party.<\/em><\/p>\n When North Korea was suffering from famine in the 1990s, the state broadcaster hailed the benefits of dieting<\/a>, and a national slogan became \u201cLet\u2019s Eat Just Two Meals a Day!\u201d A television documentary reported on a man who ate too much rice \u2014 and exploded.<\/p>\n Radios and televisions can tune only to North Korean stations. On the black market, technicians can be found who will tinker with the devices so that they can receive South Korean or Chinese stations, but possession can get one\u2019s family sent to a labor camp. Some 100,000 people are said to live in these prisons.<\/p>\n \u201cIn my opinion, conditions in North Korean labor camps are as severe and brutal as the Nazi camps were,\u201d said Thomas Buergenthal, who served on an International Bar Association panel<\/a> investigating North Korean prisons and is himself a survivor of Auschwitz.<\/p>\n My own view is that the priority for now should be the nuclear weapons issue and that we shouldn\u2019t make improvements in human rights a condition of those talks for fear of causing them to collapse. But I also believe that Trump can and should explain to Kim that his regime will never be fully respected unless it improves on human rights and accounts for Japanese citizens kidnapped over the years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI expect President Trump to strongly urge Kim Jong-un to immediately resolve the Japanese abduction issue,\u201d said Takuya Yokota. His sister, Megumi Yokota, then 13 years old, was kidnapped<\/a> by North Korean spies in 1977 while she was walking home from school. North Korea has acknowledged kidnapping her and taking her there but claimed, not very credibly, that she then committed suicide.<\/p>\n Robert Gallucci, who negotiated the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea, acknowledged that nuclear weapons are the core issue for now but added<\/a>, \u201cEventually, for normalization to work, you\u2019re going to have to deal with the human rights issue.\u201d<\/p>\n Likewise, Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group said he didn\u2019t want to make nuclear negotiations any more complicated by adding human rights conditions. But he also said, \u201cIf North Korea\u2019s goal is, as it might well be, to end U.S. sanctions and normalize bilateral relations, then they should know that won\u2019t happen as long as the regime treats its citizens as it does now.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the years, I\u2019ve had many hours of discussions with North Korean officials about human rights. North Korean officials are indeed sometimes willing to discuss human rights if they don\u2019t feel they\u2019re being hectored or condescended to and they feel they are being listened to. Here\u2019s an exchange I had with a senior official in North Korea about Otto Warmbier, the University of Virginia student arrested there:<\/p>\n