"Auschwitz Under Our Noses"?

Anne Applebaum writes at WaPo, Feb. 4:

.... Look, for example, at the international reaction to a documentary, aired last Sunday night on the BBC. It described atrocities committed in the concentration camps of contemporary North Korea, where, it was alleged, chemical weapons are tested on prisoners. Central to the film was the testimony of Kwon Hyuk, a former administrator at a North Korean camp. "I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber," he said. "The parents, son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing." The documentary also included testimony from a former prisoner, who says she saw 50 women die after being deliberately fed poison. And it included documents smuggled out of the country that seemed to sentence a prisoner to a camp "for the purpose of human experimentation."

But the documentary was only a piece of journalism. Do we really know that it is true? We don't. It was aired on the BBC, after all, an organization whose journalistic standards have recently been questioned. It was based on witness testimony, which is notoriously unreliable. All kinds of people might have had an interest in making the film more sensational, including journalists (good for their careers) or North Korean defectors (good for their cause).

The veracity of the information has been further undermined by the absence of official confirmation. The South Korean government, which believes that appeasement of the North will lead to reunification, has already voiced skepticism about the claims: "We will need to investigate," a spokesman said. The U.S. government has other business on the Korean Peninsula too. On Monday Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told a group of Post journalists that he feels optimistic about the prospect of a new round of nuclear talks between North Korea and its neighbors. He didn't mention the gas chambers, even whether he's heard about them.

In the days since the documentary aired, few other news organizations have picked up the story either. There are other priorities: the president's budget, ricin in the Senate office building, David Kay's testimony, a murder of a high school student, Super Tuesday, Janet Jackson. With the possible exception of the last, these are all genuinely important subjects. They are issues people care deeply about. North Korea is far away and, quite frankly, it doesn't seem there's a lot we can do about it....

This is a deadly serious issue, of course, so I do not mean to politicize it. However, I must say that I find it ironic that the one world leader who decided to act in a similar situation in another part of the world less than a year ago, based on much more & much stronger evidence than may ever be possible in the case of North Korea, is right now being pilloried for having done so — and by the very people, I dare say, who are probably really big fans of the Washington Post. I wonder if the irony is lost on the columnist and editors.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 02/06/04 06:54:16 AM
Categorized as International.