In his 2002 State of the Union address, then-President George W. Bush declared the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea an “axis of evil,” one of three countries that sponsored terrorism. While nearly two decades have passed since this metaphor, the overwhelming American sentiment towards North Korea remains one of antagonism, consequently deteriorating our perception of the country's human rights violations in lieu of the more excitable Kim dynasty and Communist regime.

 

Essential to comprehending the source of North Korean human rights is an understanding of how controversial war practices by U.S. military forces during the Korean War shaped the future of North Korea. The vast majority of fighting during the war occurred from June 1950 to July 1953. By the war's ceasefire, millions of Koreans were dead or displaced in the conflict-ravaged peninsula.

 

Over these three years of conflict, the United States Air Force committed to relentless aerial bombing campaigns and engaged in war crimes that worked counteractively to propel the North Korean propaganda machine to success for decades to come. Massacres such as the No Gun Ri Massacre and other less-covered atrocities during the Korean War resulted in the deaths of thousands of noncombatant women and children. With Communist China’s entrance into the Korean War, U.S. military forces engaged in aerial bombing campaigns that surpassed levels of firebombing against Imperial Japan during World War II, targeting civilian infrastructure such as dams and rice paddies and killing some two million civilians. Then-head of U.S. Strategic Air Command General Curtis LeMay provides an unfortunate color to this figure, claiming years after the war’s ceasefire that “we went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea […] we killed off…twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war.”

 

Consequently, North Korea’s Communist Party has been able to embed in the minds of North Korean civilians the picture of America as an anarchic force of evil through propaganda, a fixture of North Korean society today. First-person experiences by North Korean combatants and noncombatants alike surely corroborate this notion; the fear of Americans is and was genuine. Such aggressive aerial bombing campaigns by the USAF allowed Kim Il-sung to militarize North Korea out of a vigilance, as he expressed to American reporters in 1972:

[Our people] have strong anti-U.S. sentiments because they suffered great damage at the hands of the U.S. imperialists during the war…Since the situation is tense, we cannot but continue stepping up preparations for war. We make no secret of this. Who can guarantee that the U.S. imperialists will not attack this country again?

Interestingly, the North Korean propaganda machine has extrapolated these atrocities to incriminate U.S. military forces in other atrocities that likely never happened; many North Koreans visit the Sinchon Museum annually, where they learn of American servicemen brutalizing women and children in the most grotesque ways imaginable during the supposed Sinchon Massacre and over the course of the war. Scheduled visits to the museum by the Kim lineage over the decades construe political moves that serve to reignite anti-Americanism whenever expedient.

 

Some 70 years have passed since the Korean War. In the decades following an armistice agreement in 1953, South Korea has experienced an unprecedented and exponential economic growth while their northern counterparts have fallen victim to chronic food and resource shortages, including a nation-wide famine in the 1990s that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of residents. In order to maintain a vice-like grip on power, the Kim dynasty continues to violate human rights by suppressing nearly all civil liberties and arbitrarily detaining and incarcerating hundreds of thousands of dissidents, petty criminals, and repatriated asylum seekers in labor and reeducation camps, practices that contextualize the common belief that North Korea has one of the worst human rights record in the world.

 

United States foreign policy toward the “Hermit Kingdom” has varied over the decades, but largely retained a hardline stance. As the United States expanded its influence to other countries around the world in the post-World War II era, so followed its inherited position as global hegemon, increasingly so after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. As the U.S.S.R. was a principal ally for the extent of North Korea’s existence, its fall resulted in a cessation of humanitarian aid to North Korea and a growing sense of power insecurity among the North’s political elites. As the country starved through the decade, Kim Jong-il cracked down on all facets of North Korean society and reinforced a national image of being a last-line defense to Communism against American imperialists. President Bush’s hawkish “axis of evil” comments to the American people came only a few years later.

        

Today, the trend of American presidents challenging North Korean threats invariably continues. However, President Donald Trump’s decision to brand his relationship with Dictator Kim Jong-Un as a “friendship” overshadows and permits the country’s human rights violations. The United States continues to tolerate the rogue nation’s temperamental leadership and abysmal human rights record so long as the country does not disrupt global peace, imposing economic sanctions that both sides recognize fail to inspire fundamental change within the country.

        

East Asian power politics and a unique symbiotic relationship between American and North Korean political elites also dominates the narrative of North Korean relations with the outside world. As the Kim regime exerts its authority over an oppressed people, the United States finds reason to maintain its military might in the region, stationing tens of thousands of servicemen in South Korea and Japan. Today, the People’s Republic of China has surpassed the Soviet Union as America’s main adversary, and the entirety of Asia is the sphere of influence in contention. China, too, finds value in maintaining Sino-North Korean relations in part due to alliances between the United States and all other regional powers. Further, should the Kim regime fall, maintaining the United States Navy’s 7th fleet and already controversial military bases currently located in Korea and Japan would be difficult for policymakers to justify.

        

As time passes, the unfortunate reality is that North Korea’s Communist Party continues to repress and abuse its citizens. Widespread corruption at all levels of the government furthers inequality, with unknown millions forced into labor. Due to a severe lack of government transparency, sexual violence, malnutrition, and discrimination based on sex and class continue to define society. As the COVID-19 pandemic ravages the region, government secrecy compounded with an already fragile health system suggest tens of thousands could die from the virus in the coming months.

 

This precedent does not have to continue, however. As Chinese support for the Kim regime slowly wanes with time and recent developments including Kim Jong-un’s health problems continue to raise concerns over future political instability, change seems increasingly possible. Appropriately responding to change remains the crux of the situation’s uncertainty. 2017 declarations by President Donald Trump to meet North Korean threats with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” make evident the value in appropriate response; after all, what provocative statements like these mean to Americans is different to a country and people that possess visceral and traumatic memories of previous experiences of American fire and fury.

 

 

​

​