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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy it's a good time to be a dictator like Kim Jong-un or Assad (Nothing shocks us anymore)
Horrors like those detailed in the UN report into North Korea aren't enough to get the world to do something. The response is shock, but then a collective shrugThe international community now knows about the horrors perpetrated
by Kim Jong-un, but it is unlikely to take any action.
In the early 1990s, when I was in my infancy as a reporter, the dominant international story was the war in the Balkans. Several of my peers made their names covering that war and were deeply affected by it. What motivated at least a few of them was not the desire simply to be on the front page or lead the evening news, but a passionate urge to let the world know what was happening. Several believed that, if only the world could see what they could see in Bosnia, then it would act.
Perhaps the authors of the latest UN report into human rights in North Korea felt a similar motivation. They can be satisfied that, thanks to their 372-page study, no one now can claim to be ignorant of the horrors committed in that place. They are laid out in stomach-turning detail: the torture, the deliberate starvation, the executions committed in a network of secret prison camps. The individual cases break the heart: the seven-year-old girl beaten to death over a few extra grains of food; the boy whose finger was chopped off for accidentally dropping a sewing machine in the factory where he was forced to work; and, most shocking of all, the mother forced to drown her just-born baby in a bowl of water.
But how confident can Kirby be that action will follow? Any UN plan even a referral of North Korea to the International Criminal Court would hit the immediate obstacle of a Chinese veto in the security council. (China, after all, is implicated in North Korea's horrors: when people somehow manage to escape across the border, China's policy is to hand them straight back.)
It's a similar story in Syria. Less than a month has passed since a report laid out comprehensive evidence of the suffering of detainees at the hands of the Assad regime. That report, like the latest one on North Korea, detailed murder through starvation, beatings and torture complete with photographs of emaciated bodies. Then, as now, the authors noted chilling echoes of the Nazi crimes of the 1940s. Yet did that report spark a worldwide demand for action, with demonstrations outside parliaments and presidential palaces? It did not. Perhaps mindful that any call for UN action would be blocked by a Russian veto, the chief response was a global shrug.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/18/north-korea-good-time-to-be-dictator
Ironically, the world did act after the revelations of the atrocities in Bosnia. And the region is better today for it. That may have been the last time that the world reacted to such a tragedy.
Indeed, it is a good time to be a dictator - particularly one with nuclear weapons (the dictator's best friend).
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Why it's a good time to be a dictator like Kim Jong-un or Assad (Nothing shocks us anymore) (Original Post)
pampango
Feb 2014
OP
Adrahil
(13,340 posts)1. Thanks to Dubya....
... the world is simply unwilling to do anything anymore. That smug fucker poisoned the waters of international response. No one wants to be a member of any kind of "Coalition of the Willing."
If you're a homicidal dictator, now is your time to shine!
And Vladimir Putin and the Chinese have your back!