Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (Human Rights)

I thank my right hon. Friend for those comments, and hope that we shall continue to give that engagement a chance. I recently had a constructive exchange of views with Ambassador Ri Yong Ho of the DPRK and found him to be very concerned about the threat of war on the Korean peninsula and deeply anxious to find ways to improve his country’s relations with the United Kingdom. For the people of North Korea the horrors and memories of war are very real. After all, combined North Korean and Chinese casualties in the conflict of 1950 to 1953 are estimated at £3.8 million. General MacArthur proposed to drop some 50 atomic bombs on North Korea and north-east China. As that was just a few years after the atomic incineration of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it could not be considered an idle threat. Indeed, the then Labour Government dispatched the Foreign Secretary to Washington urgently to dissuade the Americans from that course of action. Since 1999, South Koreans have lodged complaints with the Seoul Government about more than 60 alleged large-scale killings of refugees by the US military in the 1950-53 conflict. The army report of 2001 acknowledged that investigators had learned of other, unspecified civilian killings, but said that they would not be investigated. No wonder Ambassador Ri said, ““Nothing can be worse than a war. We know what a war is like.””