If there was ever any cognizable justice in holding Gomes in a prison cell for peacefully presenting a petition to North Korean border guards, it ended months ago.
North Korea says an American man being held for illegally crossing its border has tried to kill himself. A statement issued by the regime’s official Korean Central News Agency says Aijalon Mahli Gomes’ suicide attempt was “driven by his strong guilty conscience,” plus disappointment and despair that the U.S. government “has not taken any measure for his freedom.”
This is a transparent demand for ransom, and our government has legal tools for responding to terrorist tactics like this (sadly, it lacks the spine and the sac to use them). Gomes hasn’t been allowed to speak to his mom since April. And while I won’t criticize Robert Park for his still-unretracted confession until I’ve done a little time in a North Korean prison, I’ve noticed that Gomes hasn’t given his captors any such thing.
Speaking of hostages, the Daily NK reports that more than ten North Korean refugees have been living in the Japanese Embassy in Beijing for the last two years, held hostage to Chinese demands that Japan could not legally accede to without violating the same Refugee Convention that China itself flagrantly violates:
Several North Korean defectors who are under the protection of Japanese consular offices in China have not been able to leave China. The Chinese government has been asking Japan to sign an agreement to no longer accept North Korean defectors in exchange for letting them leave the country. [Wall Street Journal, via the Asahi Shimbun]
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In most countries, the civil service is known for its generous health benefits for family members. That may be true in North Korea, too, but benefits like that must surely be outweighed by risks like these:
North Korea’s Ministry of State Security last month sent 34 relatives of former economic official Pak Nam Gi and others to a prison camp on the outskirts of the northern city of Hoeryong, Seoul-based Good Friends said on its website. [….]
On June 14, the relatives of Pak and other officials were collected and forcibly loaded into a wagon before being sent to the prison camp, the organization reported, citing an unidentified official at the North’s security ministry. The authorities transported the relatives in the middle of night in part to keep it a secret from the rest of the world to avoid international criticism, the official was quoted as saying.
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Grimly, Kang Chol Hwan looks forward to a less horrible future for Korea.
Kang Cheol-Hwan, North Korean defector and activist, thinks Kim Jong Il’s brutal North Korean regime will collapse within three years, five years at the most. But the prospect doesn’t make him giddy. On the contrary, the imminent fall of the one of the world’s most repressive states just means more work. However much he wants North and South Korea to be reunified, he knows that how it happens is as important as reunification itself.
“If it’s done wrong, it will fail,” Kang told me last week when he was in town to attend a conference on the fate of the North Korean regime. As founding director of the North Korea Strategy Center, a nonprofit in Seoul, Kang works to prepare North Korean defectors for leadership roles after reunification. But in many ways, he works just as hard to prepare South Koreans — and even Korean Americans — for the inevitability of a unified Korea. And its discontents.
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The Chosun Ilbo wonders if Kim Jong Il’s stroke has had more of an effect than some of us had thought:
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has ordered the demolition and rebuilding of a theater that was in perfect condition, adding to suspicions that his judgment is becoming severely impaired as a result of a stroke in 2008. Citing North Korean sources, Radio Free Asia reported on Monday that a national theater in Pyongyang was demolished in May and is being reconstructed. People there “seem to wonder why a building that was just renovated in 2003 is being rebuilt.”
The theater was torn down on May 9 just after Kim watched a play there, making his first public appearance since his visit to China early that month. Kim had apparently watched another performance of the same play there on April 27 and after his second visit had enough and ordered it rebuilt.
“It’s strange enough to watch the same play twice in less than two weeks, but it’s even more absurd to order the reconstruction of a building that was renovated just seven years ago,” said a South Korean intelligence official. “It appears that the aftereffects of Kim Jong-il’s stroke are more serious than we thought.”
It just pains me to think of all the yachts, centrifuges, Mayback sedans, and razor wire the children of North Korea have been denied because of the wasteful spending of its politicians on make-work patronage projects.
Open News talks about the impact of foreign broadcasting on North Korean soldiers.
Good on the Japanese government for continuing to shelter North Korean refugees in the face of Chinese diplomatic pressure.
Sonagi, I remember the words of the Japanese PM diplomatically standing up to the Chinese whose people had violated the sovereignty of the consulate to drag out North Koreans who had managed to enter: “Give us back our North Koreans.”
Joshua wrote:
Ouch.
Still, I’ll give Robert Park the benefit of the doubt in that, once Mr Gomes traipsed into the North, Mr Park might have not wanted to piss them off with an ill-timed retraction.
In what I see as a sign portending Mr Gomes’s release (with an attempt to extract some sort of ransom, as you state above), the DPRK has had the Swedes (the US representatives in Pyongyang) visit Mr Gomes.
Kang says he likes talking to Korean American audiences in part because he finds them more sympathetic to his cause than South Koreans. South Koreans would rather not think about the hardships in the North. Not only do a lot of Korean Americans have roots in the North, but, he says, “they are further away and are nostalgic for the homeland.”
What Kang faces in the ROK, I as a Korean-American whose grandparents were all born in present-day North Korea face here in the United States.
In several conversations with many expatriate Koreans over the past years, the overwhelming majority of these native Koreans displayed at best a nonchalant attitude towards North Korean issues, and at worst, apathy. It was bad enough that they were unaware of some of the most basic facts about the reality of the DPRK (prison camps, religious persecution, exploitation of DPRK female defectors in China, and discrimination against defectors), but they simply had no desire to learn any further, and when I would somewhat angrily question them on how they could be so clueless about events concerning their ethnic brethren while they all agreed with and had been raised on a philosophy of racial and cultural homogeneity with the people of the North, they would simply blame their schools and Korean society.
In fact, while some of these expatriates demonstrated respect towards my interest in this issue and my grasp of the facts, several had a patronizing attitude, as if to say, “good job, HUK; you do know a lot for a Korean-American.”
Interestingly, none of them has ever given a real argument as to why Korean nationals are always angry at Japan re: the comfort women but have absolutely no concerns about North Korean women being exploited, raped, abused, and enslaved in northeastern China. I guess the dignity of Korean women only matters when it’s the Japanese (and in some cases, surly US GIs) being the violators.
Not to defend any such attitude, but South Koreans tend to expect better from democratic countries and purported allies than dictatorships aligned against them.
At any rate, I think you are making a very selective comparison: assuming that the reasonably informed about North Korea are the exception while assuming the intensely angry toward Japan are the norm. When the CSI is the #1 paper, I’m not so sure if the former is a safe bet or that the latter doesn’t fall apart when the most vocal people are not around.
Anyhoo, again, not to defend any such attitudes, but SoKos suffer from threat fatigue and fairly recent memory of anti-North Korean sentiment used and abused (and sometimes even manufactured) for less-than-noble political aims. Folks been burned in the past, and it sometimes looks like the same people still have the book of matches.
At any rate, HUK, you’ll do more good if you work on informing people instead of bemoaning the existence of ignorati.