Otto Warmbier’s death should end all hope of accepting Kim Jong-un’s regime as legitimate
John Power says the brutality on display – now targeted at North Koreans and foreigners alike – is a reminder to all that the North Korean dictator cannot be reasoned with or induced to change
We may never know exactly what happened to the 22-year-old college student during his 15 months in custody, but we know enough. We know that Pyongyang sent a healthy young man to his grave for the supposed “crime” of trying to remove a propaganda poster from his hotel.
How North Korea’s hostage playbook backfired with Otto Warmbier
Warmbier’s death is a heinous crime. This should be a watershed moment in how the international community deals with North Korea. Scholars and journalists have long assumed that the North Korean regime was hesitant about seriously harming foreigners in its custody, especially Westerners, out of concern for its international image. Even as three generations of the Kim family have condemned countless numbers of their own countrymen to lifelong misery or death in a gulag, authorities have in the past released tourists from custody relatively unscathed after several months. It’s now clear that the regime no longer feels any need to treat visitors as human beings either.
As long as the Kims remain in charge, North Korea will be a blight on humanity