President Trump has confounded all his critics by bringing the North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-un to the negotiating table. No one should forget the reasons – that, as well as being a nuclear threat, North Korea is one of the most brutal places on earth.
Until this morning’s Today programme, I had not heard the BBC’s admirers of appeasement-loving former President Obama express much concern about this – about the fear Kim Jong-un wields, about the total oppression and indoctrination of the country’s people, about its off-the-scale human rights abuses and its never-to-be-returned-from concentration camps, to which all family members can be condemned.
I couldn’t help wondering why it has taken the BBC till now to deal with what is normally high on their agenda – human rights – and to invite Amnesty on to the programme to talk about North Korea.
Well, whatever Today’s motivations, Amnesty is right on this: these terrible abuses must not be forgotten in the rush to defuse North Korea’s nuclear threat. (It’s a pity though, as they gave this warning, they didn’t take the opportunity to most humbly apologise to President Trump for having called him a human rights violater).
Last year, as President Trump set out his new tough approach to North Korea, we interviewed J P Floru, author of The Sun Tyrant: A Nightmare called Korea. He stated categorically then that Trump was right on both moral and political grounds – that there was no choice.
You can read about Floru’s experience of a country he’s described as second only to Pol Pot’s Cambodia in its barbarity here.
