Published Tuesday, April 3, 2001

Minneapolis Star and Tribune

Commentary: Bush's 'Leave no child behind' policy doesn't extend to North Korea.

Richard C. Kagan

President George W. Bush has created a pretty slogan: "Leave no child behind." This has a great domestic ring. But internationally, George W. has abandoned children's rights.

The clearest case is in his handling of the crisis in Korea. In a meeting with the President of South Korea, Kim Dae Jung, Bush canceled all plans to continue direct negotiations with North Korea, and snubbed President Kim's efforts for re-establishing relationships with the other half of Korea. It is true beyond a doubt that North Korea presents major security problems to the United States and Japan. Its secret nuclear weapons, its export of missel systems to Iraq, and its threats to South Korea are a severe threat to international stability and regional peace.

Yet drawing a noose around North Korea not only enforces its sense of isolation, but also makes any other negotiations with its leadership an impossible task. One example of this problem is the condition of North Korean children who have escaped from their homeland and are living in extremely harsh conditions in northern China. Under the current situation, there is no way to discuss the plight of these children directly with North Korea. Discussions in South Korea are frozen until relationships with the north become stabilized. And China does not want to be engaged in pressuring the officials in Pyongyang when America considers them to be leaders of a rogue country. In fact, it refuses to recognizes these children as refugees. Its security officials search them down and return them to the arms of the North Korean police.

The famine in North Korea has created a tremendous exodus of North Koreans , numbering over 200,000 seeking safety, food, and shelter across the border into China. Thousand of children many of whom are orphans live in a Charles Dickens world of exploitation and terror. Many are abused in all the classical ways that stateless people are treated: they live in constant fear of being captured and returned to North Korea; they work as cheap and unprotected labor which verges toward conditions of slavery; they are considered with disdain by outsiders; and they suffer from severe nutritional depravation. Women suffer even more from sexual and physical abuse. It is a microcosm of the conditions in Bosnia and Rwanda.

Information on the plight of these children has been censored because of political considerations. The right wing in So. Korea uses them to prove that North Korea and China violate the human rights of children and refugees. Thus, they argue that North Korea should be treated as an enemy. China resents any interference in its domestic affairs. And North Korea becomes angry that researchers are finding out information that contradicts the extravagant propaganda of the regime which adulates the strength, freedom, and health of their children.

Recent scientific studies have revealed that these Korean children, both at home and in the refugee camps in China, are suffering from severe, and perhaps long lasting nutritional deficiencies. Their frames are stunted, their bodies are underweight, and their nutritional security is threatened. They are similar to the starving children of Iraq. They must be fed. They also must be protected from violence.

However, these children are lost in the multiple battle zones of the old Cold War. It is important to see them as just children who need to be recognized and supported. The United States, the European Union, the United Nations, other international agencies, and professional organizations such as the Association for Asian Studies should mobilize their efforts to aid these children and not let their lives slip into the chasm of personal despair and public neglect. Just like the pre-War Jews, these children should be given special travel documents to leave their hostile conditions and find educational and nutritional opportunities in safe and nurturing territory.

President George W. Bush and his advisors need to focus on more than the small bull's-eye of national security, territorial safety, and missile defense. First of all, they should be willing to embrace President Kim Dae Jung's policies of gradual reunification. These policies must, indeed, include national security. But they must also recognize that reunification with a population that has severe physical, emotional, and psychological defects that result from children who have been harmed nutritionally, and who have been harmed as refugees creates almost intractable short term and long term problems. We must not leave any children behind.