The admissions of regret are as inevitable as the spring following the winter. Once the hideous enormity of genocide is laid bare for the entire world to see, international leaders who chose to do little or nothing at all to stop it emerge from their secure locations to explain their inaction and make shrill pronouncements of "never again."
Although few people outside Pyongyang know the exact figure, about 250,000 political prisoners are suffering and dying in North Korea's concentration camps. The handful of the doomed who have escaped these hell holes report that starvation, brutal living conditions and torture are the genocidal instruments of choice employed in the camps.
The day will come when the totalitarian regime that has governed North Korea for the past half century will be held to account for its crimes against humanity. After the survivors bear what is left of their souls, after the images of emaciated human forms flood the media, after a museum is erected in the vain hope that such cruelty can be averted for all time, politicians will step forward to ease our collective conscience with a slathering of well-chosen words.
One of the masters of apologetically explaining inaction in the face of genocide is President Bill Clinton.
During a visit to Rwanda in 1998, Clinton offered the following artfully crafted rhetoric in describing why he and other world leaders failed to answer the call when hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were slaughtered over the course of 100 days in 1994:
"The international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy, as well. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide. We cannot change the past. But we can and must do everything in our power to help you build a future without fear, and full of hope.
"We owe to those who died, and to those who survived who loved them, our every effort to increase our vigilance and strengthen our stand against those who would commit such atrocities in the future here or elsewhere.
"Indeed, we owe to all the peoples of the world who are at risk because each bloodletting hastens the next as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable. We owe to all the people in the world our best efforts to organize ourselves so that we can maximize the chances of preventing these events. And where they cannot be prevented, we can move more quickly to minimize the horror.
"So let us challenge ourselves to build a world in which no branch of humanity, because of national, racial, ethnic, or religious origin, is again threatened with destruction because of those characteristics, of which people should rightly be proud. Let us work together as a community of civilized nations to strengthen our ability to prevent and, if necessary, to stop genocide."
North Korea has been committing genocidal acts on thousands, possibly millions, of its own citizens for decades. World leaders have done little to nothing to stop these crimes against humanity.
When will we rise to the challenge? When will we save our North Korean brothers and sisters from the same fate the Jews endured in the gas chambers, the Cambodians experienced in the killing fields and the Rwandans bore at the hands of machete-wielding thugs?
What too-little-too-late apology will we offer for our inaction?
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