While the Committee asked me to focus my remarks on US government policy on human rights abuses in North Korea, I should begin with a description of those abuses and the totalitarian nature of the Pyongyang regime. (My views described here are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of Texas A&M or of the Bush School or of the Committee on Human Rights in North Korea). North Korea remains one of the few surviving Communist states in the world, and the only one of these which continues to resist any serious political or economic reform. Cuba, Vietnam, China, and Laos have all taken steps to privatize sectors of their economy and given individual citizens small amounts of choice in their private lives, even if they remain authoritarian states. North Korea is thus in a unique category of its own, a single totalitarian dinosaur remaining of an otherwise virtually extinct species.
