Johann Hari: After Saddam another tyrant must be toppled by force

Novelist Julian Barnes decided to create a little frisson of fear last week.

In a newspaper article, he reminded readers that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had explained to MPs that North Korea had to be "dealt with" after the Iraq conflict.

Barnes then jibed: "Are you getting hot for the next one - the humanitarian attack on Pyongyang?" Oh, the very idea.

The subtext was: See, dear reader, how mad these politicians are compared with us sane, decent folk?

Let's look at North Korea. We imagine that even the worst places on earth are only a live broadcast away, yet the sole remaining fully Stalinist state is a dark abyss about which we know very little.

There has been almost no access to the country for outsiders for 50 years. The juche (self-reliance) ideology of the ruling elite has sealed the country off from the rest of the human race.

This one, strange country of 22 million people was set up by Stalin. While the Soviet Union renounced Stalin in the 1950s and collapsed altogether in 1991, this nation persisted with Uncle Joe's policies for decades while the world looked elsewhere.

A crack in the seal of North Korean tyranny has opened, allowing us a glimpse into a world we had not imagined.

More than 300,000 brave North Koreans have risked death and traversed dangerous mountains and jungles to flee to China, and are trying to tell the world about what they have escaped from.

Aid agencies, too, have had a tiny glimpse of the country. Far too few of us have bothered to listen.

Refugees have explained that the country is filled with "detention centres" - or, as they can more properly be described, gulags. Their prisoners are primarily homeless people who have fled their towns and villages in a desperate search for food.

Amnesty International has described the conditions in these prisons: "Twenty to 50 people are crammed into a small room and given a tiny amount of food each day.

"Many people are reported to have died of hunger and disease in such places ... [There is] a detention place in Chongjin, in the east of the country, where the detainees were only fed once a day with cakes made out of corn stalks. They were forced to work all day and were held in such cramped conditions that they had to sleep standing up.

"[One former inmate] said that after one week at least three of his cellmates had died."

Award-winning journalists at the NBC network have documented the existence of a gulag in the far north of the country which holds 200,000 men, women and children accused of "political crimes".

At "Camp 22" in Haengyong, 50,000 prisoners toil every day - and a quarter of them die every year. Whole families are imprisoned for even the most bland political statements.

Forced abortions - even in the eighth month of pregnancy - are common, says Human Rights Without Frontiers, as is infanticide.

Many of the refugees have been so brainwashed by the regime that they believe the entire world looks up to its leader Kim Jong Il as a hero and North Korea as a paradise.

The psychosis of the leader cannot be overstated. Japanese film-makers who were kidnapped and held as Kim's prisoners for years explain that he appears to think that Western action films are an accurate representation of life in America.

All triplets born in the country are seized from their parents and held in state orphanages because they are considered lucky.

Hunger is endemic in North Korea because of the Government's catastrophic economic system. Amnesty offers the conservative estimate that 10 per cent of the population - two million people - have died since 1994 from hunger.

Many refugees argue that a quarter of the people they know (which would extrapolate to a national total of five million people) have starved to death. There are widespread reports that people have resorted to eating grass, the bark of trees, rats and even human flesh.

While this was happening, Kim spent more than $848 million on weaponry.

It is tempting to argue that the solution to the horrific suffering in this country is to flood it with humanitarian aid, but the people who have tried that tactic say that it does not work.

Medicin Sans Frontieres withdrew its aid efforts in 1998 when it became clear the regime was using the food supplies to prop itself up and award its supporters.

Most refugees say they never saw a drop of food aid, despite almost one million tonnes flooding into the country every year since 1994.

Aid, of course, cannot deal with the human rights abuses.

The Clinton Administration - with the South Korean Government - tried to engage the regime in dialogue in the hope that ending its isolation would cause it to liberalise. But the humanitarian situation deteriorated during engagement, and the North blatantly broke its agreement not to develop nuclear weapons.

The diplomatic route - which US Secretary of State Colin Powell is trying to relaunch next week when he meets the North's neighbour, China - might deal with weapons of mass destruction, but would do nothing about the human rights abuses.

Does anyone think in all conscience that we should deal only with the bomb factories, and ignore the human rights abuses? No, no, no. America's fear about weapons of mass destruction should be directed to do some wider good.

The nations of the world, united through the United Nations (and we can all surely agree that Kim is the last person alive whose finger we would like to have on a nuclear button), must take out the North's nukes with a targeted use of special forces, intelligence and bombing.

This is not as dangerous as it sounds. As Chris Bellamy, the Independent's military expert, explains: "A nuclear weapon won't detonate if bombed. If it goes off accidentally, the worst that will happen is that the conventional explosives will go off. The chances of a nuclear explosion are negligible."

North Korea - if the regime doesn't implode - can then be invaded and liberated.

The British Government is sceptical of this solution. A Downing St source explained: "It is politically impossible for an American President to sell a military engagement in Asia after Vietnam. It can't be done, and we're not expecting an invasion of the North."

But what better option is there for the people of North Korea? Doesn't anybody care about them?

When North Korea is eventually opened up - when 200,000 people are released from a single gulag - the effect on world opinion will be like the opening of the gates of Auschwitz. We will ask in agonised introspection how we could have stood by and done nothing while this level of suffering was inflicted on our fellow human beings.

And we will look at articles such as that by Julian Barnes - which try to claim the moral high ground for smug inaction - with contempt.

Any decision to stand by while the people of North Korea are butchered, battered and starved will be, to coin a phrase, not in my name.

- INDEPENDENT