By Claudia Rosett, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Later this month, the United Nations Secretariat will hold its yearly exam to recruit staff from among member states for the U.N.'s worldwide professional service. Among those now eligible are nationals of North Korea.
Which raises a question unlikely to be included in this exam: What is North Korea doing in the U.N. in the first place? If recruiting North Koreans to work inside the U.N. sounds like a good way to integrate the rogue regime of Kim Jong Il into civilized and responsible company, think again. This exam is a portal to lifetime U.N. employment, with perquisites, access and license for world travel under the auspices of an organization supported in large part by U.S. taxpayer money and dedicated (in theory) to guarding, first and foremost, the security of peace-loving states.
In the world's most tightly controlled state, the only way to take this exam would be with the approval of Kim's government. In other words, in offering this exam to North Koreans, the U.N. Secretariat is in effect recruiting Pyongyang's agents into its civil service.
Asked how many North Koreans are taking the exam this year, a U.N. staffer in the human-resources department gives a ritual U.N. answer: "We are working in cooperation with member states, and member states may not be happy if we provide that information." Will North Koreans be taking it? "We hope so," says this diligent bureaucrat.
As threats from North Korea go, potential infestation of the U.N. Secretariat may seem the least of our problems. More urgent is Kim's trafficking and testing of missiles, his production of nuclear bombs, and the horrible reality that with the full knowledge of the world, his government, which let millions of its people starve to death in the last 15 years, also runs prison camps which for brutality rival Stalin's gulag. The United States and some allies have also been trying to contend with evidence against Kim's government that includes counterfeiting of U.S. currency, state peddling of narcotics, profiteering from forced labor, and a program in which Japanese citizens were kidnapped in the 1970s and 1980s. If any regime in the world qualifies as "rogue," not to mention "monstrous," this is it.
But what this modest little U.N. exam illustrates is the extent to which bureaucracy, once it grinds into action, has a tendency - especially at the U.N. - to shrug off even the worst outrages. Kim runs a police state in which people are hauled off to be tortured, worked to death, or summarily executed for dissent. Meanwhile, U.N. officials file reports on their plans to pump resources into North Korea to promote "a national sustainable development strategy" or "Capacity Building for Enhanced Development Cooperation."
Last month, the U.S. mission at the United Nations tipped out a stack of correspondence in which Mark Wallace, U.S. envoy for U.N. reform, detailed his efforts to chase down reports that U.N. offices in Pyongyang were funneling hard cash to Kim's regime. Among the highlights in Wallace's questioning was the information that North Korea now holds seats on the executive boards of three major U.N. agencies: the U.N. Development Program, the U.N. Population Fund, and UNICEF. In fact, the U.N. last month paid more than $35,000 to fly three North Korean officials round-trip, business class, from Pyongyang, to spend two weeks in New York for U.N. board meetings.
Since this surfaced in the press, the U.N. has promised not to pay any more North Korean airfares for board meetings. But in the vast, intricate and opaque U.N. system, trying to spot such stuff, let alone stop it, is an endless task. North Korea also sits, ironically enough, on the U.N. Conference on Disarmament, and of course keeps a well-staffed mission in New York - even with his regime now under limited U.N. sanctions, Kim's government still has a seat at the world's high councils.
On Thursday, the United States is due to return to the six-party talks with North Korea, which in the last few years have yielded nothing for the democratic world, but have bought Kim time to test his missiles and build his bombs. All the signs are that while the U.S. Treasury has been trying, with some success, to squeeze Kim's regime via banking watch lists, the State Department is now preparing to undermine those efforts with concessions. How about a different bargaining tack? As host country of and chief donor to the U.N., surely the United States has the right - maybe even the obligation - to raise the question of why North Korea, on its present course, should be allowed to remain in the U.N. at all.
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