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Washington, Nov 18, 2009 - The following oped by Rep. Ed Royce appeared in today's FlashReport.

President Obama could command the stage and energize his listless North Korea policy when he visits Seoul on Thursday.  Continuing the Bush Administration negotiating-to-nowhere approach cannot be comforting, especially as North Korea continues to build a nuclear arsenal.  The President should break form and open a human rights front that could shake the strategic balance and be a moral winner.             

Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime shows no promise of relinquishing its nuclear weapons.  Why?  Its nuclear program has proven a potent tool for extracting aid, and a deterrent for its overmatched military.  Nuclear weapons bestow prestige in its very martial mind.  So we have watched 15 years of failed negotiating with North Korea, including current Six Party Talks. 

Coordinated economic pressure could change this equation, but other countries, especially China, are disinclined to impose meaningful sanctions.  China instead props-up North Korea, fearful of a fellow communist state messily collapsing and the geostrategic consequences of re-unification, mainly getting a new U.S.-friendly Korean neighbor.  Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was recently in Pyongyang, signing extensive commercial contracts.   

Pyongyang is not without vulnerabilities.  Kim depends upon counterfeiting, drug running, missile sales and other illicit activities for revenues needed to buy the loyalty of top cadre.  Indeed, the U.S. squeeze on ill-gotten North Korean assets held in Banco Delta Asia a few years ago shook the regime.  North Korea escaped though by demanding relief as the price to restart nuclear negotiations, yet again.

The biggest and largely ignored weakness of the regime is its gross abuse of North Koreans.  Concentration camps slowly kill 200,000 political prisoners.  Millions suffer malnutrition as food supplies and international food aid is manipulated.  The average North Korean endures severe material depravation.  Although political and social dissent has been brutally repressed for over 60 years, the isolation making this rigid control possible is fading.         

North Korea is being forced open, slowly but surely.  North Koreans are fleeing, crossing into China, with some moving onto South Korea and beyond.  Exposed to lands of relative economic plenty, refugees quickly see through the official lies about North Korea's prosperity and virtues.  Radios, cell phones and computers are getting into North Korea, undermining its propaganda at home, including through communications with the refugees.  These are fine cracks on the vase. 

President Bush wisely targeted North Korean human rights abuses, initially.  North Korean refugees were brought into the White House, spotlighting their plight and human rights abuses.  Yet Bush sacrificed this clarity for the sake of fruitless negotiations.  Secretary of State Condi Rice uncharacteristically upbraided the Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights, publicly telling him to stick in his narrow lane.  The Bush nuclear negotiator even put North Korean and American human rights conditions in the same sentence.  Zeal for a nuclear deal moved North Korean human rights from the White House to the outhouse.              

President Obama should do much better.  While in Seoul, why not meet with North Korean refugees, as human rights advocates have suggested?  Speak publicly and boldly about the inhumane conditions in North Korea.  The President's voice would surely carry north of the border, being broadcast by U.S. government-backed Radio Free Asia and others.  He could rattle Kim Jong-il's world.         

North Korea would spew bile in response, but that would be nothing new.  More to the point, it is long past time to act as if the North Korean security threat stems from the nature of the country's regime.  Would a North Korea not gripped by the Kim dynasty relinquish its nuclear weapons?  Uncertain.  But it would surely be more likely to move toward meaningful denuclearization.  Yet human rights have been treated as a diplomatic faux pas.     

Unfortunately, President Obama has shorted human rights around the world.  He took eight months to fill the North Korean human rights post.  Democrats in Iran and elsewhere have received meager support from him.  The cautious State Department bureaucracy is stuck on the worn path of polite negotiation with North Korea.        

Years of jaw-jaw have failed.  Far more promising would be a policy of aggressively countering North Korean illicit activities, to foment dissent, while helping accelerate the transformation of North Korean society.  This means using an aggressive communications campaign to do all we can to expand the horizons and expectations of North Koreans.  Progress would be slow, but maybe not.     

Future historians will damn the indifference to North Korean suffering.  In this case, a vigorous human rights policy would be strategically sound, making the indifference tragic.  President Obama still has time to stir up some indignation.   

Representative Ed Royce (R-CA) is a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee

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