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The Rosett Report » Axis of Charm Offensives: Iran, North Korea…Who’s Next?
By Claudia Rosett On October 27, 2014
Every aggressive, internationally sanctioned despotism with nuclear ambitions needs a few tricks in its diplomatic tool kit, and one of these — when the going gets rough — is the so-called “diplomatic charm offensive.”
This season, as anointed last week by the New York Times, the big charmer is North Korea. Not that there’s anything in this “charm offensive” that’s actually charming. But North Korea — with its record of rogue missile and nuclear tests, abductions, counterfeiting, threats to destroy its enemies with “seas of fire,” generally taciturn diplomats and whatnot — has set the bar so low that anything remotely resembling normal diplomatic activity (in form, if not function) tends to be hailed abroad as a promising sign. So, when North Korea sent a high-level delegation to South Korea earlier this month, freed one of the three Americans it has most recently been holding in prison, and sent forth some diplomats from its United Nations mission in New York to field questions from policy makers and the press, this outreach inspired such headlines as the Times’s “The Latest North Korean Mystery: A Diplomatic Charm Offensive. [1]”
What’s North Korea up to? The obvious guess is that Pyongyang is trying to deflect criticism of its atrocious human rights record, as laid out in a detailed and damning report released this past March by a special UN Commission of Inquiry [2], led by Australian jurist Michael Kirby. This commission accused North Korea’s government, at the highest levels, of crimes against humanity, and warned North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that he could be held responsible and referred to the international justice system. There is now a push at the UN by the European Union and Japan to urge the Security Council to refer Kim himself to the International Criminal Court. Kim evidently does not like this idea, and his diplomatic envoys have been deployed in a campaign to stop any such referral. If you’d like to sample some of this North Korean “charm,” here’s a link to a debate this past week at a UN side event in New York, hosted by the Jacob Blaustein Institute and the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea — in which Kirby goes toe-to-toe with a North Korean diplomat [3] over the issue of the Kim regime’s crimes against humanity. …
-go to links-
This season, as anointed last week by the New York Times, the big charmer is North Korea. Not that there’s anything in this “charm offensive” that’s actually charming. But North Korea — with its record of rogue missile and nuclear tests, abductions, counterfeiting, threats to destroy its enemies with “seas of fire,” generally taciturn diplomats and whatnot — has set the bar so low that anything remotely resembling normal diplomatic activity (in form, if not function) tends to be hailed abroad as a promising sign. So, when North Korea sent a high-level delegation to South Korea earlier this month, freed one of the three Americans it has most recently been holding in prison, and sent forth some diplomats from its United Nations mission in New York to field questions from policy makers and the press, this outreach inspired such headlines as the Times’s “The Latest North Korean Mystery: A Diplomatic Charm Offensive. [1]”
What’s North Korea up to? The obvious guess is that Pyongyang is trying to deflect criticism of its atrocious human rights record, as laid out in a detailed and damning report released this past March by a special UN Commission of Inquiry [2], led by Australian jurist Michael Kirby. This commission accused North Korea’s government, at the highest levels, of crimes against humanity, and warned North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that he could be held responsible and referred to the international justice system. There is now a push at the UN by the European Union and Japan to urge the Security Council to refer Kim himself to the International Criminal Court. Kim evidently does not like this idea, and his diplomatic envoys have been deployed in a campaign to stop any such referral. If you’d like to sample some of this North Korean “charm,” here’s a link to a debate this past week at a UN side event in New York, hosted by the Jacob Blaustein Institute and the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea — in which Kirby goes toe-to-toe with a North Korean diplomat [3] over the issue of the Kim regime’s crimes against humanity. …
-go to links-
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