US shackled by Pyongyang's ploy

Asia Times Online:

US shackled by Pyongyang's ploy
By Donald Kirk

WASHINGTON - Now comes the hard part for American policy-makers: balancing a tough line on North Korea's nuclear and missile tests with mounting public demands in the United States to win the release of two American television journalists convicted of "grave crimes" and sentenced to 12 years of "hard labor".

No one in Washington seems to have any idea what to do. The statements that have been issued have not had the slightest impact on North Korean strategists. Instead, Pyongyang's attitude has underscored its success in using the two journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee of Al Gore's Current TV network, as tools in a much larger game.

"It doesn't look like the [Barack] Obama administration can contribute much to the equation," said Nicholas Eberstadt, scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. There has been talk of sending former US vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore to Pyongyang to help spring them, but it's another matter whether or not North Korea will receive him.

Another candidate for such a mission is New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who won the release after three months of an American who had swum the Yalu River in 1996. Richardson also helped to negotiate the release after 13 days of an army helicopter pilot shot down after straying across the line between North and South Korea.

Gore and his San Francisco-based Current TV have maintained silence on the cases, while Richardson was on morning television expressing a willingness to help. Richardson called the news of the sentencing "a good sign", observing that "in previous instances where I was involved in negotiating, you could not get this started until the legal process had ended".

Richardson, a strong advocate of reconciliation with North Korea, neglected to mention that both those cases were far simpler than that of Ling and Lee and that neither went to trial.

The Yalu River swimmer was clearly a nut, and the US army helicopter had obviously gone off course in an episode in which the co-pilot was killed. Ling and Lee, by contrast, were filming along the Tumen River border to obtain a story that would only be extremely negative in its portrayal of North Korean human-rights abuses perpetrated on defectors who cross the border to escape starvation and imprisonment.

Ling's older sister, Lisa, moreover, had earlier done a documentary for National Geographic television in which she used a hidden camera while posing as a member of the team of a Nepalese eye doctor admitted into North Korea to cure cataracts. The film ended with North Koreans removing their blindfolds, seeing portraits of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and his late father, Kim Il-sung, and thanking both of them profusely for giving them back their eyesight.

Against this background, if North Korea is receptive to anything, the price may be prohibitively high in terms of concessions that the US administration is prepared to make.

"North Korea certainly hopes to use these hostages as pawns," said Eberstadt. "Given the past record of dealing, the North Koreans have reason to think they can do so."

The North Koreans "will have conditions and demands", observed Larry Niksch, long-time research analyst at the Congressional Research Service. For starters, Niksch noted, "They will want an apology" for the "grave crimes" committed by the two women when North Korea claims they entered the country illegally by crossing the frozen Tumen River from China on March 17.

An apology might be easy enough, no matter whether Ling and Lee actually crossed the border, were standing on the ice or were seized by North Korean soldiers while on the Chinese side. But beyond the apology, it's a cinch the North Koreas "will want concessions on the nuclear issue", said Niksch. The US is preparing to press the United Nations Security Council for stringent sanctions as punishment for the nuclear test of May 25.

The administration of Obama is now hoping that China will persuade North Korea of the advantages of letting the women go - and also talk some sense into Pyongyang about its nukes and missiles.

Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg has just completed a swing through the region, leading a team of US officials including representatives of the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the Treasury Department in talks in Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo. The purpose of the exercise was to get China in line behind the sanctions that Washington wants from the UN Security Council, including provisions authorizing the search of ships and planes suspected of carrying components of weapons of mass destruction and the missiles for firing them at distant targets.

Some observers expect China to go along with a UN resolution that will be considerably tougher than the resolution adopted after North Korea's first nuclear test in October 2006. There's no guarantee, however, that China, or Russia, for that matter, will be enthusiastic about tough provisions advocated by the US, Japan and South Korea. It's quite possible the final resolution, if adopted, will be considerably weaker than the Americans would like.

In the end, perhaps in a few months or a year or two, after the families of Ling and Lee have appeared innumerable times on television pleading on their behalf, the US may have to come up with an offering.

The families of both women turned up their campaign for clemency immediately after getting word of the sentences. It was revealed that Ling suffered from ulcers that could get much worse in prison and that Lee's four-year-old daughter is already suffering from anxiety about her missing mother.

In a statement issued on Monday, North Korea's state-run news agency would not disclose in what prison the women are to serve their time. According to the Los Angeles Times, "North Koreans who receive similar sentences of 'reform through labor' often face starvation and torture in a penal system many consider among the world's most repressive." The article cited its source as David Hawk, author of the 2004 study "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps."

If the pair are held for a lengthy period, the article continues, analysts believe they may be sent to a kyo-hwa-so, or "re-education" reformatory. The literal meaning of kyo-hwa-so is "a place to make a good person through education".

"It's extremely hard labor under extremely brutal conditions," Hawk was quoted as saying. "These places have very high rates of deaths in detention. The casualties from forced labor and inadequate food supplies are very high."

Many North Korean re-education camps, the Los Angeles Times reported, "are affiliated with mines or textile factories where the long work shifts are often followed by self-criticism sessions and the forced memorization of North Korean communist policy doctrine".

The women's families said they were "shocked and devastated" by the sentences, and that the three months the women had spent in prison was "long enough". The pleas may eventually force the US to consider making creative offers that North Korea may be willing to consider.

"It seems to me, the question is whether the Obama administration will have something to lay out," said Niksch. He recommends "a big offer of food aid, probably a million tons or more, possibly two million tons", with no strings attached. In other words, the US would have to drop its insistence on seeing who got the aid - the demand that led to the end of "humanitarian" shipments from the US last year.

A large US donation may provide the opening for the bilateral dialogue that North Korea is widely assumed to want with the US - provided the talk focuses on North Korea's basic demands. These include recognition of North Korea as a nuclear state, one of nine members of the global elite of nuclear powers, and removal of the sanctions that the US is determined to impose.

The Obama administration is avoiding talk on these issues. The White House and State Department have issued statements expressing deep concerns, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has written a letter asking for the release of the women. She seems determined to keep that discussion out of the arena of efforts to get North Korea to give up its nukes.

As Clinton put it in an interview on ABC's This Week before the sentences were announced, "We don't want this pulled into the political issues." She also said their situation should not interfere with "concerns that are being expressed in the United Nations Security Council".

Clinton may be forced to discard the notion of putting North Korea back on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, even though she did remark that "we're going to look at it".

Some officials in the US believe the George W Bush administration, under severe North Korean pressure, made a big mistake in dropping North Korea from the list as a precondition for North Korea making good on the nuclear deals reached in six-party talks in 2007. At the same time, they are saying it's now too late to look back.

Clinton may have raised the idea of putting North Korea's name back on the list as a warning. This was a bad idea, said Tim Peters, a missionary in Seoul who has crusaded for human rights in North Korea. "Even to mention this at such a sensitive time", said Peters, "strikes me as idiotic."

Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.