In the prelude to the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, Robert Park, himself a survivor of Kim Jong-un's prisons, called in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post [12] for an amnesty for North Korea's tens of thousands of political prisoners to be a condition of any peace deal. He recalled a 2014 UN report (PDF [13]) finding that up to 120,000 were being held in camps in North Korea, and subjected to "unspeakable atrocities and hardships." Most are held in life-imprisonment slave labor complexes called "absolute control zones" (wanjeontongjekyooyeok or kwanliso). The report found that these prisoners "have no prospect of securing release [and] are subject to gradual extermination through starvation and slave labour…with the apparent intent to extract a maximum of economic benefit at a minimum of cost." Park quoted Thomas Buergenthal [14], a survivor of both Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen who served as a judge at the International Court of Justice, who said: "I believe that the conditions in the [North] Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps..."
Park concluded: "As the Korean war appears to finally be over and peace proclaimed – no possible pretext exists for the detention of those inside the kwanliso. So any peace accord with Kim must guarantee the complete, verifiable and irreversible release of all prisoners of conscience, political and religious prisoners together with their families."
When questioned about his complete failure to address human rights at the meeting in a post-summit press conference, Trump responded [15]: "All I can do is do what I can do. We have to stop the nuclearization. We have to do other things, and thats a very important thing."
But is it clear that any progress was even made toward de-nuclearization? BBC's Laura Bicker [16] is skeptical. She notes that closest we've got to anything concrete is Trump's vague statement that Kim said he would to close a missile testing site. This is not even mentioned in the actual text of the agreement [17] the two leaders signed, and as NPR [18] points out, it is not even clear which site is referred to. Defense One [19] speculates: "Perhaps it was the Iha-ri Driver Training and Test Facility, which the North Koreans are already razing. [20]"
Trump's pledge to call off the relentless joint military exercises [21] with South Korea is something anti-war voices in the RoK and around the world have been demanding for years—but let's see what comes of it. Meanwhile, the sudden "leftist" enthusiasm for Trump is sickening to behold. The predictable Robert Scheer [22] gushes on his TruthDig [23] about how the Trump-Kim lovefest was "A Victory for Sanity in World Politics," and admonishes us not to "nitpick this courageous step." Once again we have the notion of Trump as a hippie pacifist [24]. "President Trump gave peace a chance," Scheer opens—seemingly forgetting the terrifying nuclear saber-rattling [25] that preceded this spectacle.
In contrast, Republican senators are askance at the summit, demanding that Congress get to vote on any deal with the DPRK, The Hill [26] reports. Kinda seeming like we're through the looking glass here, eh?
And of course Trump, with his accustomed fondness for despots [27], is lavishing praise on Kim, speaking of a "very special bond" with the tyrant. "Well, he is very talented," Trump said. "Anybody that takes over a situation like he did at 26 years of age and is able to run it and run it tough. I don't say he was nice." (The Hill [28])
As the Daily News [29] notes, Trump even broached building condos on North Korea's beaches in his post-summit press conference. We could live to see it—tourists enjoying the surf from insulated luxury, while 120,000 languish in concentration camps, facing unspeakable atrocities.
Tellingly, Trump was schmoozing the dictator who runs the most totalitarian regime on the planet just days after alienating leaders of the world's most powerful remaining bourgeois democracies (we're not even sure the US counts as that anymore) at the G7 summit in Quebec. While Kim was embraced with a "special bond," Trump's trade official Peter Navarro [30] said there was a "special place in hell" for... Justin Trudeau. (NYT [31])
One senses that Fox News host Abby Huntsman had a Freudian slip when she referred to the Trump-Kim summit as a meeting of "two dictators." (AP [32])
This lovefest between a dictator and a wannabe dictator smells to us like a further consolidation of Trump's Fascist World Order [33]. While the peaceniks paradoxically cheer the right-wing demagogue, we are reminded yet again [34] of the old anarchist slogan: "Neither your war nor your peace."
