Needed: A few more Bill Clintons to rescue North Korea's other hostages
Friday, August 7, 2009 E-Mail this story Free Headline Alerts
By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON Ñ If the two female American journalists held in Pyongyang had their knight in shining armor swoop down to carry them home, is there anyone flying to the rescue of at least 1,000 South Korean and up to 20 Japanese still in varying forms of miserable detention in North Korea?
The answer so far is "no" Ñ though no doubt some of the billionaire masters of the mighty chaebol (family owned conglomerates) that dominate the South Korean economy would be glad to pay for a "private" trip to pick up some of them, just as Hollywood billionaire Steve Bing paid for much of Bill Clinton's one-day mission of mercy to North Korea.
South Koreans have tried every enticement over the years to persuade North Korea to release the captives. So far, however, the North has refused even to consider the release of an engineer whose offense appears to have been insulting Dear Leader Kim Jong-il while flirting with a waitress in the jointly operated Kaesong Industrial Complex, some 60 kilometers north of Seoul just over the North-South border.
"Appears to have been", is the operative phrase, since North Korea has so far denied numerous South Korean requests to interview the engineer, who was working for Hyundai Asan, and no one knows exactly what happened or what was said.
It is presumed, however, that the engineer, in his 40s and single, intimated something improper to a North Korean woman waitress working in an after-hours snack bar, and that she reported the conversation to her superiors. North Korean security agents then made his purported remarks the pretext for detaining him on March 30, two weeks after Laura Ling and Euna Lee were picked up on North Korea's Tumen River border with China Ñ he has been detained ever since.
The arrest of the engineer is unusual, as he was working for Hyundai Asan, the Hyundai subsidiary responsible for developing the Kaesong complex and the Mount Kumkang tourist zone on the opposite side of the peninsula.
North Korea, which controls access to the Kaesong complex, has periodically limited the number of South Koreans who can go there, but had until then arrested no one.
North Korea presumably needs the money paid by the South Korean companies that lease the land for factories that employ some 30,000 North Korean workers. The North wants to raise the rent on the factories and is demanding higher wages Ñ none of which goes directly to the workers Ñ and it obviously needs the money too much to make a habit of arresting South Korean engineers, technicians and managers.
South Korean fishermen, though, are another matter. North Korea seizes them whenever their boats stray into North Korean waters, as happened a week ago off the North's east coast. The four fishermen aboard the boat remain in North Korean hands, adding to the 500 abductees that South Korea's Unification Ministry says are held in North Korea.
They are among nearly 4,000 South Koreans who have been abducted to the North, most of them fishermen who have either escaped or died while in captivity. Not to mention the 1,748 South Korean soldiers believed to have been held as prisoners in North Korea, among whom 545 are definitely still alive, according to South Korea's Defense Ministry.
South Korea's President Lee Myung-bak talks about the detained Hyundai Asan worker in almost the same language as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did in the weeks before husband Bill took off on his rescue mission.
The South Korean government "is doing all it can to solve the issue of the worker" and "fully understands the concerns over an issue that is directly related to the lives and safety of our citizens", Lee has said.
The conservative Lee, however, is playing with a considerably weaker hand than the American officials in the State Department and White House who worked so strenuously to prepare for Ling and Lee's release. The difference is that North Korea wants to open direct dialogue with the US, excluding South Korea and jettisoning the six-party talks at which the North signed two agreements in 2007 on disabling and dismantling its entire nuclear program in exchange for massive aid.
North Korea has for the past one-and-a-half years Ñ ever since Lee's inauguration in February 2008 Ñ been calling Lee a "traitor" for his hardline policy, under which he has held back on the "humanitarian aid" routinely proffered by his two reconciliation-minded predecessors as president, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun.
Those two, Kim Dae-jung, who initiated the "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation, and Roh Moo-hyun, who perpetuated the legacy, had no more success than Lee has had in bringing home the South Korean fishermen, soldiers and assorted others whom North Korea has refused to release, including the 12 members of a Korean Air plane hijacked during a domestic flight in December 1969. Kim has failed to negotiate the release of any South Koreans, despite sending back to the North 63 accused North Korean spies and saboteurs who had been jailed for years in South Korea, after a summit with Kim Jong-il in June 2000.
Clinton did make "progress" in this area, according to South Korean and Japanese officials. South Korea's Foreign Ministry spokesman Moon Tae-young said Clinton managed, in his meetings with Kim Jong-il and his aides, to call for the release "on humanitarian grounds" of the Hyundai Asan engineer and the four fishermen captured last week. He and others in his party apparently did not raise the topic of the 1,000 or so other South Koreans, fishermen and Korean War prisoners held for years in the North, many working under gruesome conditions in mines.
Clinton was equally careful to ask Kim Jong-il "to make progress", as Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Takeo Kawamura, carefully put it, on the estimated 20 or so Japanese kidnapped off Japanese beaches but never acknowledged.
So far all North Korea has said is that 13 Japanese citizens were kidnapped, eight of whom died, and five returned to Japan. Japanese authorities are absolutely convinced there were more and have made the issue the nation's principal reason for withholding aid and refusing to consider diplomatic relations.
Neither South Korea nor Japan seem to have the equivalent of a Clinton to send on a rescue mission.
Hyundai Asan, after plunging billions into developing the Kaesong and Kumkang zones, might be glad to foot the bill for a mission, but it's all Hyundai Asan can do to fend off North Korean demands for more money for Kaesong. Hyundai Asan is also looking for a way to resume tours to Mount Kumkang, which were stopped more than a year ago after a North Korean guard shot and killed a South Korean woman who had strayed beyond the zone's boundaries to look at the sunrise.
South Korea denied it is considering sending a special envoy to North Korea, a spokesman for the Unification Ministry, responsible for dealings with the North, said on Thursday. There are now no "government-to-government channels" existing between the North and South such as that between the US State Department and North Korea's United Nations mission.
An opposition South Korean political figure, Lee Kang-rae, often at odds with the Lee government, has summarized a popular impression.
"We're disappointed at North Korea for discriminating between South Korea and the US," he said. The fact that Kim Jong-il released Ling and Lee but not the Hyundai engineer and the crew of the most recent fishing boat to enter North Korean waters, said Lee Kang-rae, "is creating a consensus in the South that there is something wrong with the North's attitude".
That may be an understatement, but attitudes in the South would change if North Korea released the Hyundai engineer and the fishermen. As for the 1,000 or so other South Koreans and 20 or so Japanese still in North Korean hands, their future is just not on the table.