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AFRICANGLOBE – Nearly a week after some countries used protests in Ferguson, MO to critique the United States’ human rights record, North Korea joined the fray on Tuesday, calling the U.S. “the laughing stock of the world” over its actions in Ferguson over the last few weeks.
North Korean state news agency KCNA inquired about the “serious racial discrimination” on display in the United States. “Some days ago, a Black teenager was shot to death by a White policeman in Ferguson City, Missouri State, the U.S. and police ruthlessly cracked down on protesters, leveling their rifles at them and firing tear gas and smoke shells,” the spokesman is quoted as saying.
“The U.S. is, indeed, a country wantonly violating the human rights where people are subject to discrimination and humiliation due to their race and they are seized with such horror that they do not know when they will be shot to death,” the spokesperson continued. “The protests in Ferguson City and other parts of the U.S. are an eruption of the pent-up discontent and resistance of the people against racial discrimination and inequality deeply rooted in the American society.”
The statement went on to call for the United States to face trial at a human rights court, echoing other countries’ demands that the leadership in Pyongyang do the same. North Korea has long chafed at reports from the United Nations and other rights bodies documenting the horrors that go on within the country’s borders and used the response to Michael Brown’s shooting to again ask to be left alone. But given that the city of Ferguson is now far quieter than it has been in weeks, with the nightly attacks on protesters by heavily-armed police and demonstrators, it seems odd that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea waited this long to use the events there as a way to prod Washington.
Other countries were more quick on the uptake. Egypt, called for the police in Ferguson to “show restraint” in their actions. The foreign ministry in Moscow, where 60 percent of Black and African people said in 2009 that they’d been physically assaulted over their race, chided the U.S. on its race relations and said it “should take care of large-scale internal problems and take effective measures to resolve them.”
By: Hayes Brown
State Terrorism Against Black People In America
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