Arsenal of Terror, 2d Ed.: China arrests N. Korean kidnap squad
To count as terrorism, an act must be (1) violent, (2) unlawful in the place where it’s committed, (3) carried out by clandestine agents or subnational groups, and (4) with the intent to coerce a government or a civilian population. To be international terrorism, an act of terrorism must also (5) involve the citizens or territory of more than one country. If this report is confirmed, it would appear to meet the definition:
Several North Korean agents were caught by Chinese police in March after attempting to kidnap a South Korean missionary at the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, according to a media report.
“Five to eight agents of North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB) were detained in Jilin Province for trying to abduct a South Korean pastor,” the Donga Ilbo reported, citing a source familiar with the incident.
The newspaper said the North’s State Security Department (SSD) and the RGB are “competing” to abduct South Koreans helping North Korean refugees in China to show their allegiance to their young leader Kim Jong-un.
“Their rivalry has become stronger since last year and the latest kidnapping case seems to have been directed by RGB director Gen. Kim Yong-chol,” it said. [Korea Times]
President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. The Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” Discuss among yourselves.
Yet, as I wrote in “Arsenal of Terror,” the State Department has repeatedly cited attempts to kidnap or assassinate dissidents and activists, when carried out by the intelligence organizations of other governments, as the state sponsorship of terrorism:
In 1994, the U.S. State Department’s reporting on Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism cited the assassination of a dissident in Turkey, the wounding of a dissident by a letter bomb, the killing of three dissidents in Iraq, the assassination of two other dissidents in Copenhagen and Bucharest, and France’s conviction of three Iranians (including a nephew of the Ayatollah Khomeini) for the 1991 murder of a former Prime Minister and his assistant.
The U.S. State Department’s 1994 report also cited Iraq’s assassination of a dissident in Beirut, for which Lebanon implicated the Iraqi government, arrested two Iraqi diplomats, and severed diplomatic relations with Iraq. It also cited Libya’s suspected involvement in the disappearance of a dissident and human rights activist in Egypt. The U.S. State Department’s 1997 report alleged that the Libyan government executed the activist in early 1994.
The U.S. State Department’s 1995 report accused Iran of escalating “its assassination campaign against dissidents living abroad,” voicing suspicions that Iran was involved in the murders of seven dissidents in Iraq, France, and Denmark. The following year, the U.S. State Department accused Iran of “at least eight dissident assassinations outside Iran,” including the assassination in Paris of a former government official “by an Iranian resident of Germany with alleged ties to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).” Its 1996 report noted that German authorities had issued an arrest warrant for Iran’s Intelligence Minister for ordering the 1992 assassinations of four Iranian-Kurdish dissidents in a Berlin restaurant. According to the U.S. State Department’s 1997 “Country Reports,” the German court found that “the Government of Iran had followed a deliberate policy of liquidating the regime’s opponents who lived outside Iran,” and that the assassinations “had been approved at the most senior levels of the Iranian Government,” including by “the Minister of Intelligence and Security, the Foreign Minister, the President, and the Supreme Leader.” The U.S. State Department’s 1998 and 1999 reports made similar allegations.
In 2000 and 2001, the U.S. State Department accused the Iraqi Intelligence Service of collecting intelligence on, and attempting to intimidate, dissident groups abroad. Its 2002 report accused Iraqi Intelligence of assassinating another dissident in Lebanon. [Arsenal of Terror, pages 18-19, footnotes omitted]
You could call it progress that the Chinese arrested them, perhaps because this time, the targets would have been South Korean. Ordinarily, North Korean kidnap squads operate more-or-less freely on Chinese soil, at least when they target North Korean refugees.
One sees no signs of progress in our own State Department. As I noted on pages 59 through 65, North Korea has repeatedly kidnapped and assassinated third-country activists and dissidents in both China and South Korea, including the Rev. Kim Dong-Shik, a U.S. permanent resident. Yet for some reason, the State Department appears to have granted North Korea transactional immunity for its acts of terrorism. This impunity may explain why North Korea’s terrorist threats have now reached the United States itself.