The mid-February report issued by the United Nations on human rights abuse in North Korea removed any mystery about the unspeakable atrocities and depths of depravity reached by this criminal regime and it did even more: it once and for all removed any doubt about the fact that China is the enabler that sustains this regime. Without trade with China, North Korea is unsustainable, unable to feed itself and completely isolated from the rest of the world.
China’s obsession with a return to respect among nations and what it considers to be its historic and rightful place in world leadership clearly dominates its every move. But it should no longer be allowed to have it both ways. If it truly seeks the credibility of world leadership, there must be a day of reckoning for its complicity in the enabling of North Korean atrocities and beyond that, it should come clean with a “truth commission” much like post-apartheid South Africa that faces the facts of the genocide perpetrated by the Communist regime of Mao Zedong, which dwarfed in its size and scope anything Hitler even dreamed. As we learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first and most difficult step in unwinding a totalitarian system is to tell the truth.
