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It's all based on the Danforth model for Sudan, where now UN [United Nations] Ambassador [John] Danforth, a former senator, was named as the special envoy for Sudan. He then became the focus of U.S. policy towards Sudan and raised the issue to a much higher priority level than it would otherwise have had.

What are the prospects for passage in the House?

I would say 100 percent. One is always reluctant in politics to say 100 percent. It will probably go before the House sometime [this] week. There's a commitment from the leadership. There is broad consensus in the House of Representatives as well about this bill because they all had input into the bill.

Does this bill have the support of the Bush administration?

Well, the Bush administration has been very mixed on North Korea. I think the President personally has just been powerful in his condemnation of the human rights violations of the regime. … The administration didn't take a prominent role. This was a matter that moved forward because of the powerful evangelical community and evangelical human rights effort.

What are some of the bill's other provisions?

One, it will force the United Nations to more aggressively confront China for China's failure to allow refugee status to be granted to many of the escapees from North Korea now happy to be eating tree bark in China. It almost seems the Promised Land compared to North Korea.

How does the bill do that?

Well, it will press the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] to exercise many of the powers it has to force China to live up to its treaty obligation to allow the UN to have access to these refugees. And there's a kind of implicit warning the U.S. funding even for the UNHCR is going to be, in some measure, conditional on the UN taking a much more aggressive posture vis-à-vis China, which now simply declares all by itself that every refugee is an economic migrant, rounds them up, in some cases sticks barbed wire through the noses of the North Koreans rounded up, and then gives them over to the North Koreans—where if they are suspected of being Christians, they are sent to the most brutal gulags that North Korea has.

Next, … the AID [United States Agency for International Development] administrator is told very, very clearly, and he's got to report to Congress on this, that U.S.-provided food has got to be distributed on a needs basis and no more of the business of U.S. food feeding the army while selective starvation of the population takes place at the hands of the regime. So there's a very clear congressional expression on that issue.

There will be expanded radio broadcasts into North Korea. There will be greater use of NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], and particularly some of the Christian NGOs, to distribute the humanitarian aid, rather than the UN.

There will be provisions in the bill that will make it easier for North Korean escapees to achieve refugee status in the United States and come to the United States as refugees.

It's going to make it very difficult for U.S. dollars, no matter who is President, to be used by this regime, no matter what it promises to do, to build more gulags.

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October (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48