A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

So while here, I will indulge in my periodic question addressed to all and sundry: Can we call the North Korean regime "evil" now?

North Korea has no people with physical disabilities because they are killed almost as soon as they are born, a physician who defected from the communist state said on Wednesday.

Ri Kwang-chol, who fled to the South last year, told a forum of rights activists that the practice of killing newborns was widespread but denied he himself took part in it.

"There are no people with physical defects in North Korea," Ri told members of the New Right Union, which groups local activists and North Korean refugees.

He said babies born with physical disabilities were killed in infancy in hospitals or in homes and were quickly buried.

The practice is encouraged by the state, Ri said, as a way of purifying the masses and eliminating people who might be considered "different."

The group urged the South Korean government to change course away from "silent diplomacy" and immediately begin taking action to pressure the North to improve its human rights record.

The South Korean government has refused to join international condemnation of human rights abuses in the North out of concern that such a move could rattle ties with Pyongyang, which considers any criticism of its human rights as deeply offensive.

"The government should stop trying to avoid upsetting Kim Jong-il," said another defector, Kim Young-sun, 67, referring to the North Korean leader. "It should try to upset Kim Jong-il," she said, adding it would be the best way to change the North.

Kim Young-sun is a survivor of the North's Yodok prison camp, notorious for its forced labor and life-sentences for people charged with conspiring against the Kim Jong-il leadership.

Mun Hyon-ok said women from her hometown in the northern region of North Korea bordering China were taken by a ring of human traffickers and probably ended up in China.

"And there are women who are selling themselves for a handful of rice," she told the forum.

Do recall, of course, that the concept of calling the North Korean regime "evil" was--and for all I know, may still be--controversial. And goodness, we can't have that:

. . . on the eve of talks with North Korea about their nuclear weapons, Bolton took a novel approach to public diplomacy and publicly called King Jong Il a "tyrannical dictator" and an "evil regime." The State Department was forced to send a replacement representative after North Korea responded by calling Bolton "human scum" and stating their objection to negotiating with him. . . . Bolton's resistance to carrots and multi-lateralism helped stall approaches to North Korea for months.

I'm all for diplomacy. But there is something to be said for not denying the obvious.