By Claudia Rosett, Rosett Report
Monday, August 6, 2007
Sipping soda and chatting away to the press, one of the most indefatigable briefers on the international scene is the U.S. envoy to the six-party talks on North Korea, Chris Hill. Part of Hill's diplomatic art includes ladling out a certain amount of merriment in his endless rounds of morning walkthroughs, evening walkthroughs, airport interviews, statements, q and a's, and full-bore press briefings. On July 23rd, having just returned from Beijing, Hill gave a briefing for which the State Department's transcript includes seven instances of mirth so pronounced that the transcribers took the trouble to note, in parentheses, the "laughter" soundtrack.
Humor is a fine thing, in its place. But the words that punctuate this gaiety are disturbing in the extreme. The subject here is North Korea, and a regime that has starved to death an estimated one to two million of its own people (possibly more), cheated on its 1994 nuclear freeze deal, indulged in criminal rackets that according to the U.S. government include counterfeiting U.S. currency, and last year set horrifying and dangerous precedents for rogue states by testing an intercontinental ballistic missile and a nuclear bomb. In response to the deal struck by Hill in February, North Korea's totalitarian government has already engaged in its usual tactics of insult and delay, while ratcheting up its demands. So far, Pyongyang has extorted a host of concessions, including bilateral talks, arrangements for free fuel and other aid, and, at Hill's urgent behest, the unfreezing and transfer to Kim, with the help of the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve, of some $25 million in allegedly crime-tainted funds. In exchange, Kim has shut down the same Yongbyon reactor that he shut down in the mid-1990s as prelude to cheating on the Agreed Framework nuclear freeze deal conceived by Jimmy Carter and signed on to by President Clinton. But there is no sign yet of North Korea providing the promised full accounting for all its nuclear ventures.
So what has Hill been saying about that, amid the comic by-play? Well, one disturbing development is that it gets ever harder to tell from his language whether he is negotiating on behalf of the U.S., or of North Korea. From that same July 23rd briefing, here's his "big thing" rationale for why North Korea has not yet provided that nuclear accounting:
"Bear in mind, they just did a big thing last week. They shut down an entire complex, and sometimes when you've just done a big thing, you don't want to wake up the next day and go on and do another big thing."
(Note: In his linguistic flip, above, from "they" to "you," the "you" with whom he apparently wants us to identify, or at least sympathize, is … Kim Jong Il).
Later in the briefing, a reporter asked if Hill had any sense that North Korea is about to provide the promised nuclear accounting. Hill's reply belongs to the genre of "what the meaning of 'is' is," except here it's the meaning of "all":
"Well, you know, we're not going to talk about what they're prepared to do. I mean, let me just talk about what we're prepared to do and when we look at a declaration, it has to -- and all means all and we're not prepared to look the other way and pretend that a partial declaration is all, so -- I mean, we, I think, owe it to ourselves, owe it to our citizens to be very vigilant and to insist on all meaning all."
Somehow, this is not a locution that inspires confidence. It conjures visions of Hill sitting at the negotiating table with Pyongyang's emissaries and trying to gentle them along with this brand of vaguely imploring diplomatic baby talk, while they speak for a regime that lives off slave labor, narcotics peddling, counterfeiting, and nuclear extortion. But OK, let's cut Chris Hill some slack. It's a long flight between Beijing and Washington, and that time zone change is a doozy.
Except now we get to where the bottom drops out. Hill wends his way to the subject of human rights in North Korea (which, in keeping with Pyongyang's preferences, he refers to not as North Korea, but as the DPRK -- short for Democratic People's Republic of Korea). He starts off sounding pretty good, noting that even if North Korea scraps its nuclear program,
"That doesn't mean that we end our problems with the DPRK. We will continue to have issues. We have human rights concerns in DPRK."
But from there, it's straight downhill:
"I mean, there are certain standards, international standards. We don't think the DPRK is quite up to those. And that's going to be a continuing issue. But unless we can solve this nuclear issue, I don't think we can even get to those."
This statement --chilling in its implications -- comes in between laugh lines involving Hill's chipper relations with the press. What Hill has just said is that in all his talks with North Korea (the big-thing-doing DPRK), human rights are not even on the table.
That's not funny. It's horrifying. This grotesque version of diplomatic etiquette, including Hill's toadying description of North Korea as "not quite up to" international standards, is more likely to aggravate the threat from North Korea than to end it. The message to Pyongyang, and to anyone else listening in, is that Hill is so eager to produce a deal -- no matter how false -- that he doesn't dare upset Kim Jong Il.
For a serious test of the value of these talks with North Korea, here's something worth tabling while Kim Jong Il recovers from the exertions of switching off Yongbyon (again). Why not demand that Kim open up North Korea's Camp 22 to a snap visit by the international press? That would be far more informative than this endless flow of merry briefings from Chris Hill. It would also be a bargaining chip far more in keeping with our own democratic principles than the rotten old habit of trying to buy peace by sending tribute -- which we call aid -- to Kim's regime.
What is Camp 22? You can read about it and take a satellite-photo tour, on Joshua Stanton's One Free Korea blog. It's a labor camp in northeasten North Korea, believed to hold about 50,000 men, women and children -- part of a North Korean gulag that for cruelty rivals the labor camps of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. These camps are the dark core of the Kim dynasty's long reign of hideous secrets, duplicity and terror. Until they are opened and dismantled, no promises from Pyongyang at the bargaining table will be worth trusting. Until Hill starts negotiating from that premise, it doesn't matter how many chortles he gets at his press briefings. The last hideous laugh will be Kim's.
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