In Lafayette Park Now: Reading the Names of 83,000 Abductees

[Update 3: This demonstration came up in a State Department news briefing today. From the comments of both the spokesman and Chris Hill, State is clearly backing away from calling these abductions acts of terrorism. After unambiguously calling the abductions terrorists acts in 2006, State is now airbrushing this issue out of the record.

To a degree, you can understand this in the case of South Korea — tragic as that may be — because in the end, it is the citizen’s own government that is responsible for protecting him, and South Korea’s only really cares about citizens whose bodies might turn up during an election year. But you can say no such thing of Japan. And if Japan can get its people back, what would the South Korean people say about the lie called “quiet diplomacy”?

Scroll to the bottom of this post for full transcripts of the relevant questions and answers.]

[Update 2: State is denying that North Korea has been removed from the terror list. Well, of course. The process of removing any country takes months. The question is what we promised them, and how soon.

“Getting off the list will depend on further denuclearization,” Hill told reporters …. Hill declined to specify what North Korea must do but said those things have been discussed with North Korean officials. “They know what these steps are,” Hill said. [AP]

This is why North Korea likes to talk to people bilaterally. Japan has to be thinking that there was a secret deal behind its back, and disunity between us and Japan — the only real ally we have at those talks — could hurt us.]

[Update: One of the organizers just e-mailed me to say that the demonstrators will be back in front of the White House tomorrow night, from 6 to 7.]

Original Post: The loved ones of people abducted by North Korea are calling their names so that they won’t be forgotten. There are so many that it’s taking days to do it.

“We are going to call out the names of more than 83,000 people who have been abducted by North Korea from all over the world including China, Japan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Romania, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand.

We are calling out their names, one by one, to remind ourselves that the freedom of each abductee is as precious as our own, to inform the world of their plight, and to appeal for help for winning their freedom.

We are calling out their names, one by one, wishing in some way, to let them know that they are not forgotten, that we will be working for their freedom as long as necessary, and that all of us, families, friends, and supporters are looking forward to their safe and prompt return home.

We are calling out their names, one by one. Whatever country he or she belongs to, every single abductee is as important as anyone else. It takes less than 5 seconds to call one name. Yet, one name represents one life.”

The demonstration was scheduled to go through at least tomorrow. The vast majority of those 83,000 were abducted during the Korean War.

Is our State Department listening? The North Koreans claim that Chris Hill agreed that we will remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terror despite its failure to account for the abductees. That directly contradicts what State said just days ago, but no doubt, some in State are eager to do it. The good news is that our State Department is marginally more credible than the North Koreans.

More information about the abductees here, here, and here. There’s also an award-winning documentary about one of them, Megumi Yokota. She was just 13 when the North Koreans abducted her from the shores of her home town. The North Koreans later returned a set of ashes it claimed were hers, but DNA tests proved that the remains weren’t Megumi’s. South Korea prefers not to mention its own abductees, whether they’re kids, prisoners of war, or anyone else.

You’ll also be happy to see that Koreans and Japanese can work together after all if politicians are nowhere in sight.

We are also seeking volunteers to participate this event. Please contact Bae, Jae-Hyun(배재현) 703-338-2388, 701-372-5314, mission2china@hanmail.net; Ms. Akemi Maeshima, maeshima@asanocpa.com. Seun Woo Kahng 301-718-7711 hayajio@gmail.com.

Update 3, Continued: Here’s the relevant excerpt from today’s State Department briefing, for Tuesday, September 4th, 2007. I put the question about this demonstration in bold text:

QUESTION: Okay. On — can you give us a little more clarity as to where this situation stands with North Korea?

MR. CASEY: Well, I’ll go through a little bit of what we discussed this morning. Basically, in the February 13th agreement, it was stated that the United States would begin the process of removing or looking at removing North Korea from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism and will also continue the process of doing so for the Trading with the Enemy Act. What has happened is there’s been discussions in the working group about those issues. As Chris said, he feels they made some progress on them. But of course, how this will be done and any timing under which it will be done is something that is yet to be determined and would obviously have to be part of the discussion that the working groups would have in their report to the envoys on ultimately part of any discussion about a agreement that the envoys would reach for the overall next phase of nuclear disarmament. That was easy. (Laughter.)

Sue.

QUESTION: Change of subject?

QUESTION: Tom —

MR. CASEY: I knew I couldn’t get away with just one on that.

QUESTION: Was there anything —

QUESTION: Do you have a better sense of when that envoy level meeting could take place?

MR. CASEY: No, I don’t have a date for you on that, Kirit. The Japan-North Korea bilateral working group is, I believe, meeting today and tomorrow in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. That is the last working group to meet. Certainly, I think, we would hope to have a envoys-level meeting fairly soon thereafter, but at this point, a date hasn’t been set, though I certainly know we’d like to see some progress made on that this month.

Sue.

QUESTION: Change of subject?

QUESTION: Same subject.

MR. CASEY: Same subject. Let’s go back here.

QUESTION: Yeah. As you say that everything comes out of the working group goes to the six-party envoy meeting and it’s released out of there, is there any consideration coming out of this working group, this meeting this weekend between North Korea and the U.S., is there any consideration by the U.S. to present a plan to the six-party envoy group coming — upcoming that will remove North Korea off of the terrorism list?

MR. CASEY: The plan is to do what everyone’s always said we’re going to do. The working groups will meet. They will present their recommendations to the envoys. Based on those recommendations, the envoys will create an overall plan.

Certainly, progress on some of these bilateral issues, actions taken to move forward on some of them, I’m sure will be part of that discussion. But I think it would be wrong to say based on the meeting of this working group that anything has been decided because, again, this is not a matter of the working groups acting in isolation. All of what each of the working groups has done needs to be put together into a coherent package and a coherent agreement among all six parties as to the specific steps that will be taken as well as to the sequencing of them when they put together the next formal agreement on what will now be the disablement phase.

QUESTION: Right. But what I’m asking is, is the United States at the next six-part plenary considering presenting a plan there for discussion about taking North Korea off of the terrorism list.

MR. CASEY: No, I’m sure there will be an opportunity for the working group to report on their recommendations, but there is no separate U.S. plan involved. There are working groups. The working groups make recommendations. The envoys evaluate them and come up with a coherent framework or a coherent agreement to move forward. And that’s how I expect we’ll be continuing.

Yeah, Joel.

QUESTION: Tom, this morning at the White House, they’re reading off a group of 83,000-plus names of abductees by the North Koreans. These involve abduct — not just from South Korea but from eight other countries. And there are two groups involved, the Rescuing Abductee Center of Hope — for Hope and the Citizens Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees. Has this been brought to the attention of the North Koreans by Chris Hill and his talks, and what are you going to do along with members of Congress to facilitate the release of these individuals?

MR. CASEY: Joel, I am unfamiliar with either of those groups or any of their information. I simply have to refer you to them. However, there is certainly a longstanding issue, and one that we’ve discussed many times before from here, which is the question of abductees, Japanese abductees, to North Korea. This is one of the primary concerns and issues being discussed in the Japan-North Korea Working Group. It is also something that people have heard as recently as last week from the President on that the United States is very concerned about. It is something that Chris Hill discusses in his conversations with the North Koreans. It is a subject of discussion more broadly at the six-party talks. And it is, of course, one of the issues that we need to see progress on as well as we go forward with the overall six-party process and nuclear disarmament on the Korean Peninsula.

OFK: But note the careful and obviously deliberate avoidance of accounting for the abductees as a precondition to removal from the terrorism list.

QUESTION: Thank you.

MR. CASEY: Yeah.

QUESTION: Tom, sorry to go back on this, but could you —

MR. CASEY: Oh, no you’re not. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Could you please tell us what North Korea should do to get away from this terror list?

MR. CASEY: Well, look, I’m not going to try and give you any kind of detailed listing on this. North Korea is on the list of state sponsors of terror because of actions that it took that were determined a long time ago to have met the legal requirements for this. It — as we move forward with the review process, those questions will have to be answered. Certainly, there is also a series of legal standards both for getting on the list in the first place as well as getting off. And as we’ve seen in other instances where this has occurred, there’ll be some, I’m sure, fairly detailed discussions on those issues so that if this in fact does happen, everyone can be satisfied that U.S. laws and regulations have been fully met.

But these are things that I think will be under continued discussion over time. If you go to the annual report we put out on this issue, you can see the listing of what concerns there are about North Korea, and I think that probably would give you the best idea of what kinds of issues might be subject to discussion.

QUESTION: But based on the state terror — based on the State Department website, the last terrorist act by North Korea was in 1987 in relation to the bombing of the Korean airline flight?

MR. CASEY: Mm-hmm. If that’s what it says on our website, I assume that’s the latest information that we have that’s publicly available. Obviously, there are other issues and concerns that may be there that are not part of the public dialogue, but I expect that there’ll be some serious discussions about this issue as people move forward with the group meetings.

OFK: You could be charitable here and say that the spokesman just wasn’t prepared for this question and was obfuscating to conceal his lack of knowledge. But he should have been prepared for this. Instead, it sounds like State’s spokesman was prepared to publicly link the terror list to disarmament, which logically, is much less directly related to terrorism than abductions. Hey, France has nukes, and we don’t list them as sponsors of terrorism, do we?

QUESTION: Do you consider its nuclear weapons program as terrorism?

MR. CASEY: I don’t believe the definition in the law talks about nuclear weapons, no.

QUESTION: So denuclearization is not linked to removal from the terrorism list?

MR. CASEY: The standards for getting on and off the list of state sponsors of terror are in U.S. law. I don’t want to try and interpret it for you. The law is there and I think the terms are pretty clear.

Yeah, Libby.

QUESTION: I’m going to switch topics, if that’s okay.

MR. CASEY: Oh, I think Sue’s got —

QUESTION: Okay.

MR. CASEY: We’ve got one more on North Korea and one to go.

QUESTION: Okay. On — I wondered if you had any comment on Heinz. It sold its stake in — in its cooking oil maker to President Mugabe’s government —

MR. CASEY: I thought we were still on North Korea. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Oh, sorry, are we still on North Korea?

MR. CASEY: All right, we do have — well, I think we got one more North Korea one and then we’ll do Heinz’s stake in, yeah, Zimbabwe.

QUESTION: Yeah, but I just wanted to say that —

MR. CASEY: Sure.

QUESTION: Daniel Ryntjes, from Feature Story News.

MR. CASEY: Yeah.

QUESTION: That you would characterize some forward movement in the discussions wouldn’t you because, you know, North Koreans are saying they are going to declare —

MR. CASEY: Well, more important than my characterization of it is Chris Hill, who’s our negotiator, who is out there in the talks. And Chris said that there was — this was a good session; that they made some progress on the issues in the bilateral working group. So definitely, I do think there is — there’s progress and there’s forward movement. But again, the only caution I want to hold out for people is that having these working group sessions, while important, is not an agreement of and by itself, and that we got a long way to go in this game to ultimately achieve what everyone agreed to back in September of ’05, which is the complete ending, disablement, and dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear program.

Okay, now.

It’s disappointing, to say the least, that not one journalist in the room specifically asked State’s spokesman if North Korea would have to account for the abductees to get off the terrorism list. Has their position had changed from what Chris Hill stated it to be last week? I have so little faith and trust left in this Administration when it comes to North Korea, I just never know.

Similarly, when the press caught up with Chris Hill arriving at the airport in Sydney, he said that removing North Korea from the terrorism list “will depend on steps that they need to take on further denuclearization.” No mention of the abduction issue, however. In fairness, at least “further denuclearization” is a condition. It’s not a condition I trust State to enforce strictly, but it’s a condition.