Korean Chair Questions Myths
By Sally Acharya

(From American Weekly, Nov. 28, 2006)
Page 3 of 3
For a disastrous economy like North Korea’s to maintain such vast numbers as an effective fighting force is simply “impossible,” Yoo says. Yet the army must be maintained to keep Kim Jong Il in power and in control of the North Korean population.

Nuclear weapons, Yoo suspects, have been pursued because they’re “the cheapest way of having a national defense. That’s my guess. The primary purpose is to convince his own military that the military has a reason to be there.”

Yoo doesn’t buy the common description of Kim Jong Il as a madman. “Many people say he’s crazy, but he has maintained his power. He’s rational in his way.”

He cautions that he is not a military expert, nor a political scientist. But he feels increasingly drawn to work on issues relating to the isolated regime that is home to 23 million people, who are starving as their cousins to the south prosper. “I feel I really have to do something about human rights in North Korea. I have no idea what it will be, but my conscience is telling me that,” he says.

Economics and human rights are hardly unrelated, he says. In fact, in its most fundamental form, “Human rights is really nothing but freedom and property rights,” he says. “If you uphold and protect human rights as you should, the economy really takes care of itself, and the government can go about its own business of providing what it should.”

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