http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091110/ap_on_re_as/as_koreas_naval_clash
SEOUL, South Korea – The two Koreas briefly exchanged naval fire Tuesday along their disputed western sea border, with a North Korean ship suffering heavy damage before retreating, South Korean military officials said.
There were no South Korean casualties, the country's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement, and it was not immediately clear if there were any casualties on the North Korean side. Each side blamed the other for violating the sea border.
"It's a regrettable incident," South Korean Commodore Lee Ki-sik told reporters in Seoul. "We are sternly protesting to North Korea and urging it to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents."
North Korea's military issued a statement blaming South Korea for the clash, saying its ships crossed into North Korean territory. North Korea demanded an apology, according to a statement carried on the official Korean Central News Agency.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, who convened an emergency security meeting, ordered his defense minister to strengthen military readiness.
The clash — the first of its in kind in seven years — occurred as U.S. officials said President Barack Obama has decided to send a special envoy to Pyongyang for rare direct talks on the communist country's nuclear weapons program. No date has been set but it would be the first one-on-one talks since Obama took office in January. Obama is due in Seoul next week.
South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that a North Korean patrol boat crossed the disputed western sea border around 11:27 a.m. (0227 GMT), drawing warning shots from a South Korean navy vessel. The North Korean boat then opened fire and the South's ship returned fire before the North's vessel sailed back toward its waters, the statement said.
The clash occurred near the South-held island of Daecheong, about 120 nautical miles (220 kilometers) off the port city of Incheon, west of Seoul, the statement said.
The North Korean ship was seriously damaged in the skirmish, a Joint Chiefs of Staff officer said on condition of anonymity, citing department policy.
Lee, the commodore, said the shooting lasted for about two minutes and that the South Korean ship was lightly damaged.
South Korean military officials did not say whether they believed the crossing by the North Korean ship was deliberate. The two sides regularly accuse each other of straying into their respective territories.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency, however, quoted Prime Minister Chung Un-chan as telling lawmakers that the clash was not intentional. "Today's skirmish was accidental," he said, without elaborating.
The two sides have fought deadly skirmishes along the western sea border in 1999 and 2002.
No South Korean sailors were killed in 1999, but six south Korean sailors died in 2002, according to the South Korean navy. It said exact North Korean causalities remain unclear.
The two Koreas have yet to agree on their sea border more than 50 years after the end of their 1950-53 civil war, which ended in an armistice and not a permanent peace treaty. Instead, they rely on a line that the then-commander of U.N. forces, which fought for the South, drew unilaterally at the end of the conflict.
North Korea last month accused South Korean warships of broaching its territory in waters off the west coast and warned of a clash in the zone, which is a rich crab fishing area.
The latest conflict comes after North Korea has reached out to Seoul and Washington following months of tension over its nuclear and missile programs.
North Korea launched a long-range rocket in April and carried out its second underground nuclear test in May. But it subsequently released South Korean and U.S. detainees, agreed to resume joint projects with South Korea and offered direct talks with Washington.
Two administration officials said Monday in Washington that Obama has decided, after months of deliberation, has decided to send a special envoy to Pyongyang for direct talks on nuclear issues.
Obama will send envoy Stephen Bosworth, although no date for his trip has been set, the officials said. The officials discussed the matter on condition of anonymity because the decision has not been publicly announced.
There were no signs of unusual tensions along the heavily fortified land border separating the two Koreas. The Joint Chiefs of Staff said that were no worrisome troop movements on the North Korean side of the land border.
At Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone, an Associated Press photographer said the situation was calm. A group of Chinese tourists was visiting on the North Korean side.
The area is where officers from North Korea hold meetings with their counterparts from South Korea, the United States and other members of the United Nations command.
Showing posts with label North Korea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label North Korea. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
The Capitalist Who Loves North Korea
(Fortune Magazine) -- James Kim, an American businessman turned educator, once sat in the very last place that anyone in the world would wish to be: a cold, dank prison cell in Pyongyang, the godforsaken capital of North Korea.
Kim, who had emigrated from South Korea to the United States in the 1970s, had been a frequent visitor to Pyongyang over the years in pursuit of what, to many, seemed at best a quixotic cause. He wanted to start an international university in Pyongyang, with courses in English, an international faculty, computers, and Internet connections for all the students.
Not only that -- in the heart of the world's most rigidly Communist country, Kim wanted his school to include that training ground for future capitalists: an MBA program.
During one of his trips to the capital in 1998, with North Korea in the midst of a famine that would eventually kill thousands, the state's secret police arrested Kim.
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il didn't lock up the educator for being crazy. He got it in his head that the oddly persistent American -- who at the time, among other things, was helping to feed starving North Koreans with deliveries of food aid from China -- was a spy.
So for more than 40 days, Kim languished in a North Korean prison. An evangelical Christian, Kim wrote his last will and testament during those days, not knowing if he'd ever get out.
Which makes where he plans to be in mid-September all the more astonishing. Kim will lead a delegation of 200 dignitaries from around the world to North Korea for the dedication of the first privately funded university ever allowed in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea: the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST).
The school will have an international faculty educating, eventually, around 600 graduate students. Kim dreams ultimately of hosting an industrial park around the PUST campus, drawing firms from around the world -- a North Korean version, as bizarre as it sounds, of Palo Alto or Boston's Route 128.
There will be Internet access for all, connecting the students to an outside world that they've heretofore been instructed is a hostile and dangerous place. And among the six departments will be a school of industrial management.
"We ended up not calling it an 'MBA program,'" jokes David Kim (no relation to James), a former Bechtel and Pacific Gas & Electric executive who has relocated to Pyongyang to help set up PUST, "because they [the North Koreans] think it sounds vaguely imperialistic."
That the North Koreans are permitting this to happen -- that they have given James Kim the nod to create his university, just as he intended -- is remarkable.
It's hard for outsiders to understand just how backward, isolated, and impoverished North Korea is. Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc 20 years ago, fewer and fewer North Korean university students study abroad. Allowing PUST to proceed lets a gust of fresh air into a stilted, frightfully isolated environment.
Ben Rosen, the venture capitalist who co-founded Compaq Computer in 1982, befriended Kim last year on a visit to Pyongyang with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. After touring the 248-acre campus with Kim as it was under construction, Rosen became a believer. The university, he says, will give students "a window to the outside world and will create a new generation of technocrats with the potential to lead a post-Kim Jong Il government."
The man behind this masterstroke of international relations consciously creates a bit of an air of mystery around himself. Ask him two very basic questions -- how old are you, and where were you born -- and Kim (whose Korean given name is Chin-Kyung) cheerfully demurs.
As for his age (public records in Florida, where he was a small-business man for more than a decade, say he was born in September 1935), he says it's all in the mind -- a function of your health and your attitude. "And I am very healthy," he says with a grin.
As to where, exactly, he was born, he declines to say, without much explanation. Kim's father -- himself an educator -- was very much a product of the tumultuous history of colonization and war that engulfed Northeast Asia in the first part of the 20th century, and thus very much on the move. During World War II, Kim's father fled the Japanese occupation of Korea, escaping to northeast China -- not far from Yanji, where his son's dreams took shape half a century later.
That dream -- to bring Western education to his countrymen -- first manifested itself some 17 years ago, when Kim built a small (1,750 students) but thriving, privately funded university in Yanji, the Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST).
Twice this summer I met at length with Kim in Yanji, which abuts the North Korean border, and sits in Jilin province, where more than half of the citizens are ethnic Korean. Though pleasantly cool in the summer, this part of China is cold and dark in the winter, and Kim's standard greeting to visitors is "Welcome to the North Pole."
He is endlessly energetic. When he's not off fundraising around the world, he bounces around the campus starting at six each morning, buttonholing students he happens upon. But these days, as the dedication of the school in North Korea draws near, he is more often than not in Pyongyang.
He carries an American passport and has what amounts to a multiple-entry visa to the most closed country on the planet. (Although the Korean War ended more than 50 years ago, Washington has never signed a peace treaty with the North.) He wants to make sure the dedication stays on track.
It has already been delayed once: PUST originally was to be dedicated last year, but Dear Leader Kim Jong Il had a stroke in the summer of 2008, and everything froze. Until very recently the overt hostility North Korea had evinced toward the U.S. and its allies cast real doubt as to whether PUST would ever open.
And for that reason Kim is very, very careful to parse his language when he talks about the North Korean government. Read him what Ben Rosen said about the potential PUST has to change North Korea, and Kim interjects quickly: "We're not going to change North Korea. We're going to help it."
Kim's success in America
This is pretty heady stuff for a former small-business man who made enough money running a South Korean taxi company to move to Pensacola, Fla. (He had been visiting a cousin attending school in the Sunshine State and liked the area.)
After arriving in America in 1976, he started a wig business. "In those days, South Korea dominated the wig export business," Kim recalled recently. "So I set up a business in Florida importing wigs from South Korea. It turned out to be pretty successful."
Kim says he came to the U.S. for a straightforward reason, the same reason so many immigrants do: He figured it was the best place to "make some money."
But money, for him, was always only going to be a means to an end. "I knew that if I were to go to these two Communist countries -- China and North Korea -- and do what I wanted to do, it would not only provide me with some wealth, but a U.S. passport as well. You guys are the Roman Empire of your day; you can go pretty much wherever you want."
His commercial landlord at the time, Frank Webb, recalls two things about James Kim: that he was a devout Christian, and that he always talked about setting up schools in China and North Korea.
Kim added a clothes store in the 1980s, then bought a chain of women's shoe stores in Pensacola that he expanded successfully. In short, Kim and his wife, Grace, who helped him run the business, were living the American dream: They were recent immigrants who worked hard and were more than making a go of it. They were prospering. "By the mid-1980s we had three good businesses," Kim says now.
And that's when he decided it was time to get on with his life's work. Leaving his wife behind in Florida to sell the family business and join him later, Kim headed for the northeastern part of China, where his father had been before him.
Support from the Christian community
Of all the nations in Asia where Christianity has tried to put down roots, Korea has been the most fertile ground. Roughly 20% of the population is Christian. Westerners who come to Seoul for the first time are often surprised by the number of neon crosses that glow atop churches in the city at night.
But it is not only South Korea where Christian missionaries worked successfully to find converts. Long before war divided Korea at mid-century, Christian missionaries had gone to North Korea. Ruth Graham, the late wife of evangelist Billy Graham, went to prep school in Pyongyang in the 1920s.
Kim is emblematic of just how deep those Christian roots run in Korea. His father converted to Christianity as a young man and attended a university in Pyongyang started by Presbyterian missionaries in 1897.
He was running a Christian school near Busan, in the South, when he fled the Japanese occupation "rather than bow to Shinto gods," as Kim now says. In 1939 his father went to Heilongjiang province in northeastern China, where he opened another school for girls; he returned to South Korea in 1945, with the defeat of Imperial Japan.
When James was 15 years old, he tried to enlist in the army as the Korean War broke out, but a recruiter first turned him away as too young. "I cut my finger and wrote in blood, 'I love my country,'" so the recruiter changed his mind and accepted him. He joined an army unit of 800, and by 1952 only 17 remained. The rest had been killed.
Until that point, Kim had not himself been particularly religious. He had watched his grandfather "persecute" his father for his conversion to Christianity. But on the battlefield one night, Kim read from the Gospel of St. John, which had been passed out by a U.S. Army chaplain to the troops who remained. Having watched so much of his unit get wiped out, it was verse 3:16 that spoke to him: "That whosoever shall believe in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
Then and there, says Kim, "I vowed to God to work with the Chinese and the North Koreans -- then our enemies. I would devote my life to it, if I survived the war."
For Kim, this was not a convenient "atheist in a foxhole" moment: He studied his newfound faith assiduously. In the early '70s Kim traveled to Europe, where he attended a school set up in Switzerland by an esteemed American evangelist, Francis Schaffer. He then went to England to study at an evangelical seminary before returning to Seoul in 1972.
His plan upon arriving in China was to follow in his father's footsteps and to do sort of a dry run for his ultimate goal: setting up a university in Pyongyang. Using some of the money he had made from selling his small businesses in the U.S., and then raising money from private donors -- drawing heavily on the evangelical Christian community in South Korea and abroad -- Kim in 1992 began YUST.
To date, more than 90% of the graduates get jobs, and South Korean companies operating in China are particularly aggressive in hiring its students. "They just line up to recruit them," says Malcolm Gillis, the former president of Rice University who is on the board of PUST.
Kim and his wife now live in faculty housing, in a small two-bedroom apartment. Though not officially a Christian school, which would be illegal in China, both the faculty and the students tend to be drawn from the devout. Many faculty members go without pay (as some will in Pyongyang). And the provincial government allows YUST to have a chapel on campus accessible only to university-affiliated personnel.
"There was a lot of suspicion from the [government] at first," Kim concedes. "But as the school has grown we've shown them that we are not in any way a threat to them." Left unstated is the obvious: that the small school on the North Korean border was Kim's model for his Pyongyang project.
He had two challenges: funding it and getting the North Korean government to agree to it. Kim's deep roots in the South Korean Christian community have given him a lot of contacts among Seoul's corporate and educational elite. He has the presidents of two prestigious Korean universities on PUST's board of directors, and on a recent weekend in Yanji, Kim had two senior executives, including vice chairman Heon-Cheol Shin from South Korea's biggest oil company, SK Energy, visiting him to check on the progress of the Pyongyang project.
Kim has the energy of someone half his age -- and he never stops plumping for the university. Venture capitalist Rosen recalls that on his tour of the campus in Pyongyang early last year Kim kept pushing him to join his board of directors. At one point he pointed to one of the buildings under construction and joked, "Look, Ben, there's your new office!" (My wife, Rosen jokes, "just about died.")
North Korea, not surprisingly, is the object of intense passion among the evangelical Christian community in the South.
South Korean churches have done much good work publicizing human rights abuses in the North -- to Pyongyang's intense displeasure -- but they have also raised funds for food aid and helped distribute it via a variety of networks. But to say that a good portion of the evangelical community in the South -- and indeed worldwide -- is hostile to the Kim Jong Il government is to state the obvious.
It is into this diplomatic minefield that Kim has stepped. "If you had told me that [Kim] was going to raise money from evangelical churches worldwide to help fund a new university in Pyongyang, and that he'd get the North Korean government to go along with it, I'd have told you that you were nuts," says a state department official. "Remember, in 1998 Kim Jong Il had him held in detention."
That fact does raise questions. Ask him how he has been able to pull this project off, and Kim says, "I have unlimited credit at the Bank of Heaven." The suspicion, voiced by some skeptics in Seoul and elsewhere, is that he also must have had to make a pretty hefty deposit at the Bank of Kim Jong Il.
To the extent that any business gets done in North Korea, the piper has to be paid, foreign businessmen and diplomats say. "I'd find it hard to believe otherwise," one Seoul-based executive who has done business in the North says, "but who knows?"
Asked directly whether any of the roughly $10 million he raised to fund PUST has gone to the regime in Pyongyang, Kim says: "Every brick we used, every bit of steel, every bit of equipment, we brought in from China. I have never brought any cash into North Korea."
So why did the North Korean government come to trust him? "When I was detained, I was very calm. I wrote that I was not afraid to die, because I knew I would go to a better place. And I wrote that if I did die, I would donate my organs for medical research in North Korea. I told them I was at peace." What he heard back, Kim says, is that the Dear Leader was touched by that sentiment.
There are so many horror stories about Kim Jong Il and the country that he rules that it's hard to know what to make of that. Suspicions linger that some sort of deal was cut. That somehow Dear Leader Kim is using University President Kim. Or being paid off by him. Or that Kim has divided loyalties.
There is no evidence that any of that is true, and Kim Jong Il, despite his recent diplomatic charm offensive, isn't giving interviews.
And for the record, though Kim is excruciatingly diplomatic in terms of what he says publicly about the regime, Fortune, having spent a considerable amount of time with Kim and his team in Yanji this summer, is pretty convinced that his loyalties lie in only one direction -- to the man upstairs. And by that, we don't mean Kim Jong Il.
PUST Board member Gillis believes that Kim's lack of guile may ultimately be what convinced the North Koreans. "This is a guy who is doing this for the reasons he says: that it would be a good and helpful thing for North Korean students to have a modern, international university, with faculty drawn from abroad. Through many years of hard work, [he's] been able to convince the government that that's the case. And it has the added benefit of being true. He's open and transparent. There are no hidden agendas here."
With the formal dedication set for Sept. 16 -- Kim and his staff are deep into trying to hire faculty and settle on nuts-and-bolts issues, like which textbooks will be used in courses that will begin in a few months. As David Kim, the Bechtel alum, relates, very little of that stuff is straightforward in North Korea.
How, for example, will economics and finance be taught? While students at elite universities in most of the world learn the same basic principles from the same authors -- Econ 101 from Samuelson and Nordhaus et al. -- in North Korea, Western economics is not only alien to most citizens of the Communist state, it is also downright threatening.
This is a government whose underlying philosophy is known as Juche, or self-reliance, and everyone is supposed to be a servant of the Dear Leader. How you square that with Adam Smith's invisible hand and enlightened self-interest is not at all obvious.
"If we're just going there to teach things the way they teach them now, it's a waste of our time," concedes Kim. "But we also don't want to be perceived as doing anything that threatens them."
So PUST is -- very much -- a work in progress. But given how close it is to reality, issues like curriculum fade. The only one out there who thought there'd be an international university opening in Pyongyang in 2009, offering the equivalent of an MBA, with courses in English to some 600 students, was the same guy whom the North Koreans arrested in 1998.
James Kim and his cohorts will no doubt figure out a way to teach Econ 101. They're going to teach Western economics, and finance, and management in one of the most backward economies in the world, one which again is having trouble feeding many of its citizens, according to recent reports from NGOs there.
That may seem like a rather hopeless task, but hope -- not to mention faith -- is something James Kim has in abundance. And given that he was sitting in a Pyongyang jail 11 years ago this month, who could blame him?
Thursday, September 3, 2009
LAURA LING AND EUNA LEE MAKE FIRST STATEMENT REGARDING EVENTS LEADING TO CAPTURE
http://current.com/sl/laura_ling.htm
*kudos to Kim Cooper for this link
Hostages in the Hermit Kingdom
While covering human trafficking between North Korea and China, two American journalists wound up becoming the story.
WE ARRIVED AT the frozen river separating China and North Korea at 5 o'clock on the morning of March 17. The air was crisp and still, and there was no one else in sight. As the sun appeared over the horizon, our guide stepped onto the ice. We followed him.
We had traveled to the area to document a grim story of human trafficking for Current TV. During the previous week, we had met and interviewed several North Korean defectors, women who had fled poverty and repression in their homeland, only to find themselves living in a bleak limbo in China. Some had, out of desperation, found work in the online sex industry; others had been forced into arranged marriages. Now our guide, a Korean Chinese man who often worked for foreign journalists, had brought us to the Tumen River to document a well-used trafficking route and chronicle how the smuggling operations worked.
There were no signs marking the international border, no fences, no barbed wire. But we knew our guide was taking us closer to the North Korean side of the river. As he walked, he began making deep, low hooting sounds, which we assumed was his way of making contact with North Korean border guards he knew. The previous night, he had called his associates in North Korea on a black cellphone he kept for that purpose, trying to arrange an interview for us. He was unsuccessful, but he could, he assured us, show us the no-man's land along the river, where smugglers pay off guards to move human traffic from one country to another.
When we set out, we had no intention of leaving China, but when our guide beckoned for us to follow him beyond the middle of the river, we did, eventually arriving at the riverbank on the North Korean side. He pointed out a small village in the distance where he told us that North Koreans waited in safe houses to be smuggled into China via a well-established network that has escorted tens of thousands across the porous border.
Feeling nervous about where we were, we quickly turned back toward China. Midway across the ice, we heard yelling. We looked back and saw two North Korean soldiers with rifles running toward us. Instinctively, we ran.
We were firmly back inside China when the soldiers apprehended us. Producer Mitch Koss and our guide were both able to outrun the border guards. We were not. We tried with all our might to cling to bushes, ground, anything that would keep us on Chinese soil, but we were no match for the determined soldiers. They violently dragged us back across the ice to North Korea and marched us to a nearby army base, where we were detained. Over the next 140 days, we were moved to Pyongyang, isolated from one another, repeatedly interrogated and eventually put on trial and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor.
DURING OUR TIME in captivity, and in the weeks since we returned, there has been speculation about what we were doing in that part of the world and about what happened on the morning of the 17th. After arriving home, we were disoriented, overwhelmed and not ready to talk about the experience. There are things that are still too painful to revisit, but we do want to explain what took us to northeastern China and the circumstances of our arrest.
Our motivations for covering this story were many. First and foremost, we believe that journalists have a responsibility to shine light in dark places, to give voice to those who are too often silenced and ignored. One of us, Euna, is a devout Christian whose faith infused her interest in the story. The other, Laura, has reported on the exploitation of women around the world for years. We wanted to raise awareness about the harsh reality facing these North Korean defectors who, because of their illegal status in China, live in terror of being sent back to their homeland.
In researching the story, we sought help from several activists and missionaries who operate in the region. Our main contact was the Seoul-based Rev. Chun Ki-won, a well-known figure in the world of North Korean defectors. Chun and his network have helped smuggle hundreds of North Koreans out of China and into countries -- including the U.S. -- where they can start new lives. He introduced us to our guide and gave us a cellphone to use in China, telephone numbers to reach his associates and specific instructions on how to contact them. We carefully followed his directions so as to not endanger anyone in this underground world.
Because these defectors live in fear of being repatriated to North Korea, we took extreme caution to ensure that the people we interviewed and their locations were not identifiable. We met with defectors away from their actual places of work or residence. We avoided filming the faces of defectors so as not to reveal their identities. The exception was one woman who allowed us to film her profile.
Most of the North Koreans we spoke with said they were fleeing poverty and food shortages. One girl in her early 20s said she had been told she could find work in the computer industry in China. After being smuggled across the Tumen River, she found herself working with computers, but not in the way she had expected. She became one of a growing number of North Korean women who are being used as Internet sex workers, undressing for online clients on streaming video. Some defectors appeared more nervous about being interviewed than others. But they all agreed that their lives in China, while stark, were better than what they had left behind in North Korea.
We also visited a foster home run by a pastor who worked for Rev. Chun. The home housed six children born to North Korean women who were forced into marriage in China. The mothers had either been repatriated to North Korea or had abandoned their families. Because the children have Chinese fathers, it is unlikely they will be deported to North Korea. The foster home provides them with decent conditions, an education and hope for a better life.
In the days before our capture, our guide had seemed cautious and responsible; he was as concerned as we were about protecting our interview subjects and not taking unnecessary risks. That is in part why we made the decision to follow him across the river.
We didn't spend more than a minute on North Korean soil before turning back, but it is a minute we deeply regret. To this day, we still don't know if we were lured into a trap. In retrospect, the guide behaved oddly, changing our starting point on the river at the last moment and donning a Chinese police overcoat for the crossing, measures we assumed were security precautions. But it was ultimately our decision to follow him, and we continue to pay for that decision today with dark memories of our captivity.
AFTER WE WERE detained, the two of us made every effort to limit the repercussions of our arrest. In the early days of our confinement, before we were taken to Pyongyang, we were left for a very brief time with our belongings. With guards right outside the room, we furtively destroyed evidence in our possession by swallowing notes and damaging videotapes. During rigorous, daily interrogation sessions, we took care to protect our sources and interview subjects. We were also extremely careful not to reveal the names of our Chinese and Korean contacts, including Pastor Chun. People had put their lives at risk by sharing their stories, and we were determined to do everything in our power to safeguard them.
Our families and colleagues back home maintained total silence about our work for two full months, both to minimize the potential impact on sensitive underground work in China and to protect us. We were surprised to learn that Chun spoke with reporters publicly in the immediate aftermath of our arrest. Among other things, Chun claimed that he had warned us not to go to the river. In fact, he was well aware of our plans because he had been communicating with us throughout our time in China, and he never suggested we shouldn't go. Chun's public statements prompted members of our families to speak directly with him in Korean, pleading with him to refrain from any further comment that might jeopardize our situation and those of relief organizations working along the border.
After spending nearly five months in captivity, we were relieved to be granted amnesty by the North Korean government. We continue to cope with tremendous mental and emotional anguish, but we feel incredibly fortunate to be free and reunited with our families. We are forever indebted to the United States government, particularly to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to former Vice President Al Gore and our colleagues at Current TV, to Swedish Ambassador Mats Foyer, and to former President Clinton and his team for taking on this private humanitarian mission.
WE can't adequately express the emotions surrounding our release. One moment, we were preparing to be sent to a labor camp, fearing that we would disappear and never be heard from again; the next we were escorted into a room with President Clinton, who greeted us and told us we were going home. We are grateful to the many journalists who kept our story alive. We are humbled by the tens of thousands of people who supported us, prayed for us and fought for our release.
At the same time, though, we do not want our story to overshadow the critical plight of these desperate defectors.
Since our release, we have become aware that the situation along the China-North Korea border has become even more challenging for aid groups and that many defectors are going deeper underground. We regret if any of our actions, including the high-profile nature of our confinement, has led to increased scrutiny of activists and North Koreans living along the border. The activists' work is inspiring, courageous and crucial.
Many people have asked about our strength to endure such hardships and uncertainty. But our experiences pale when compared to the hardship facing so many people living in North Korea or as illegal immigrants in China.
The outcome of our three-day trial was never in doubt. In the end, we were convicted and sentenced to two years for trespassing and 10 years for "hostile acts." What did we do that was hostile? We tried to tell the story of repression and desperation in North Korea. It's not surprising, given the North Korean government's desire to silence any form of dissent, that the more extreme portion of the sentence was issued not for trespassing but for our work as journalists. Totalitarian regimes the world over are terrified of exposure.
We know that people would like to hear more about our experience in captivity. But what we have shared here is all we are prepared to talk about -- the psychological wounds of imprisonment are slow to heal. Instead, we would rather redirect this interest to the story we went to report on, a story about despairing North Korean defectors who flee to China only to find themselves living a different kind of horror. We hope that now, more than ever, the plight of these people and of the aid groups helping them are not forgotten.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Korean Border Reopens
Ahn Young-joon/Associated Press
South Korean soldiers passed cargo trucks lined up to enter North Korea at the customs, immigration and quarantine office in Paju, South Korea, near the border village of Panmunjom, on Tuesday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/world/asia/02korea.html?_r=1&WT.mc_id=fb_nyt531&WT.mc_ev=click
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea restored regular border crossings for traffic going to South Korean factories in the North on Tuesday, while its leader, Kim Jong-il, reiterated his government’s call for a peace treaty with the United States.
North Korea had previously called for talks with Washington to replace the truce — which fell short of a formal treaty — that ended the Korean War in 1953.
“We can ease tensions and remove the danger of war on the peninsula when the United States abandons its hostile policy and signs a peace treaty with us,” Mr. Kim said in a commentary carried on Pyongyang Radio, which broadcasts North Korean government statements abroad.
The dispatch, which was released late Monday, did not say when Mr. Kim made the statement. But the remark was the latest in a number of recent conciliatory overtures from the North.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, North Korea restored regular traffic for South Korean companies that have operations in a joint industrial park in the North Korean border city of Kaesong. The North had sharply curtailed such traffic in December.
The border will now open 23 times a day to traffic to and from Kaesong, up from 6 times, said Lee Jong-joo, a spokeswoman with the Unification Ministry in Seoul. About 110 South Korean factories employ 40,000 North Korean workers at Kaesong.
Ian Kelly, a State Department spokesman, said Monday that Washington was “encouraged” by the North’s recent gestures toward the South, but he said he had no comment on the North’s call for a peace treaty.
Mr. Kelly urged North Korea to return to six-nation talks with regional powers about the dismantling of its nuclear weapons programs. The North, which prefers a bilateral dialogue with the United States, has said the six-party framework is dead.
Also on Tuesday, a diplomatic delegation left Pyongyang, the North’s capital, for a visit to Beijing, according to KCNA, the official North Korean news agency.
China is North Korea’s principal trading partner and its biggest supplier of aid.
Washington has said that negotiating a peace treaty with the North is possible only as part of a broader process that addresses the North’s nuclear disarmament. North Korea conducted its second nuclear test in May, and there is a growing suspicion among analysts in Seoul that the North is trying to win diplomatic recognition from Washington while also being accepted as a nuclear power.
The United States led the United Nations forces that fought on South Korea’s behalf during the Korean War and then signed the truce. North Korea has tried for years to drag American administrations into peace talks while arguing that it was building nuclear weapons because of Washington’s “hostile policies.”
Sunday, August 30, 2009
North Korea Releases Fishermen
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/world/asia/30korea.html?_r=1&ref=asia
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Saturday released four South Korean fishermen it had held for a month, in another move to reach out to its rivals after months of bellicosity.
The North returned the four-man crew and its 29-ton fishing vessel at the sea border off the Korean Peninsula’s east coast. The South Korean boat was seized on July 30 after it strayed into North Korean waters when its satellite navigation system malfunctioned.
The North’s recent barrage of conciliatory gestures has been surprising, even to South Korean officials familiar with the fickle pattern in North Korea’s diplomacy. Analysts say the overtures indicate that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, has regained confidence about his health and grip on power. He was reported to have had a stroke last August.
“North Korea has suddenly become a nice guy, reaching across the table to grab South Korea’s hand,” said Cheong Seong-chang, a senior fellow at the Sejong Institute near Seoul. “South Korea fears it might be dragged into a relationship it doesn’t want. So it’s balking, pushing back its chair from the table.”
North Korea’s charm offensive began when former President Bill Clinton visited Pyongyang, the North’s capital, on Aug. 4 to secure the release of two American journalists held there on charges of illegal entry. Mr. Clinton’s visit, billed in North Korea as a diplomatic coup for the government, provided Mr. Kim with the momentum to shift his tone, analysts said.
Since then, North Korea has released a South Korean worker held for five months on charges of denouncing Communist rule, lifted restrictions on border traffic and promised to resume South Korean tours to scenic spots in the North.
It also sent a high-level delegation to the funeral of former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. When President Lee Myung-bak balked at meeting the group, the delegates extended their stay to win an audience with him and relay Kim Jong-il’s wish to improve ties. A year ago, the North called Mr. Lee a “traitor” and a “pro-U.S. sycophant.”
On Friday, the two Koreas agreed to resume reunions of elderly Koreans separated by the Korean War.
The mood is worlds apart from that of only three months ago. In April, the North launched a long-range rocket, quit six-nation nuclear disarmament talks, expelled nuclear monitors and restarted a plutonium plant. In May, it tested its second nuclear device.
“The change in Pyongyang’s approach means that Kim Jong-il has now become confident about his health,” said Kim Yong-hyun, an analyst at Dongguk University in Seoul.
His hard-line military had grown bolder as uncertainty deepened about the North Korean leader’s health, heightening tensions with the outside world. Analysts said that helped Mr. Kim tighten his grip at home while he reportedly began grooming Kim Jong-un, the youngest of his three sons, as his heir.
Mr. Kim looked gaunt after the stroke. But by meeting Mr. Clinton and later Hyun Jeong-eun, the chairwoman of the South’s Hyundai conglomerate, in Pyongyang, and increasing his visits to factories and military units by 50 percent in the first half of this year, Mr. Kim showed he was healthy enough to remain in charge.
“Kim Jong-il got the power elite to support his son,” said Mr. Cheong, the analyst at the Sejong Institute. Now he must get his people to accept the son. To do that, he needs food for the hungry people and breakthroughs in external relations that can be attributed to his son.”
But the North’s “tactical appeasing gestures” disguise its “strategic goal” of both improving ties with the United States, South Korea and other neighbors and being accepted as a nuclear power, according to Park Hyong-joong, an analyst at the government-run Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul.
Washington has been mustering international support for United Nations sanctions intended to strangle the North’s arms trade, which is an important source of hard currency for the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
United States and South Korean officials fear the North may be using its current overtures to undermine international consensus for the need to enforce sanctions. They say they are determined to break the old pattern of rewarding the North’s on-again, off-again nuclear strategy with aid and diplomatic incentives.
South Korea says it will not repeat the old format of dialogue with the North that had provided aid but failed to dismantle the North’s nuclear program. On Thursday, the State Department said it had no immediate plan to send an envoy to North Korea. Such a trip would allow North Korea to open the bilateral discussions it has long sought while continuing to shun six-nation talks, a forum Washington prefers.
Analysts say they expect the North to continue its recent tack. Mr. Kim has promised his people that he will rebuild the economy by 2012. That achievement would make the dynastic transfer of power to his son more popular domestically, but require better ties with the outside world.
“North Korea doesn’t have much time,” said Kim Yong-hyun, the analyst at Dongguk University.
Friday, August 21, 2009
South Korea Agrees to Visit by North
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/world/asia/21korea.html?_r=2&hp
HONG KONG — The South Korean government has agreed to allow North Korean diplomats to travel to Seoul on Friday to bring a funeral wreath for the former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung.
Several North Korean envoys are due to fly to Seoul on Friday and depart on Saturday, according to Seon Mi-kim, a press official with South Korea’s Unification Ministry.
The timing of the trip suggests the North Koreans will not attend the state funeral, which has been scheduled for Sunday afternoon. Instead, they are expected to meet with Mr. Kim’s widow, Lee Hee-ho, and other relatives, and perhaps visit a memorial altar at the National Assembly.
Following a series of recent conciliatory gestures, including a personal message of condolence from the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, the North floated the idea of a cross-border trip on Wednesday. The South agreed to the proposal on Thursday.
Kim Dae-jung, who died Tuesday at age 85, had traveled to North Korea for a landmark summit meeting in 2000 — including a now-famous handshake with Kim Jong-il. As president from 1998-2003, his “sunshine policy” achieved a rare rapprochement with the North.
Those policies have essentially been reversed by the current South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak.
South Korea canceled the first satellite launching from its own territory on Wednesday only seven minutes before the planned liftoff, momentarily averting new friction with North Korea. The North, which was widely denounced for launching a rocket this year, was angered by subsequent United Nations sanctions and has said the same punitive standards should be applied to the South.
But North Korea has taken steps in recent weeks, including releasing two American journalists and a South Korean worker, that have calmed tensions somewhat with the United States and on the Korean Peninsula.
In the last several days, North Korea declared its intention to reopen its highly militarized border to groups of tourists and to pursue possible new business ventures with the South.
In the latest sign of a thaw, two diplomats from North Korea met Wednesday with Gov.Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who twice went to North Korea in the 1990s to secure the release of Americans. Mr. Richardson declined to comment on the substance of the talks or say why North Korea requested the meeting, but he called it a “hopeful sign” of improving relations, The Associated Press reported.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
N. Korea confirms Bill Clinton arrival
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/08/03/nkorea.clinton/index.html
(CNN) -- Former U.S. President Bill Clinton landed in North Korea early Tuesday on a mission to negotiate the release of two American journalists imprisoned there since March, according to the country's state news agency and a CNN source.
The North Korean news agency KCNA did not disclose the purpose of the visit in its three-line dispatch. But a source with detailed knowledge of the former president's movements told CNN late Monday that Clinton was going to seek the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, both reporters for California-based Current TV -- media venture launched by Clinton's former vice president, Al Gore.
Meeting Clinton were the vice president of North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly, Yang Hyong Sop, and Kim Kye Gwan, the vice foreign minister, KCNA reported, adding that "a little girl presented a bouquet to Bill Clinton."
The women were arrested while reporting on the border between North Korea and China and sentenced in June to 12 years in prison on charges of entering the country illegally to conduct a smear campaign.
Since the United States has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, efforts to resolve the issue so far have been handled through Sweden, which represents U.S. interests in the reclusive communist state.
Watch what may lie behind the pick of Bill Clinton »
Last month, Clinton's wife -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- said the Obama administration had dropped its request for Ling and Lee to be released on humanitarian grounds and instead was seeking amnesty, which implies forgiveness for an offense.
Clinton's mission comes as the United States and its allies in the region are trying to push North Korea back into stalled nuclear disarmament talks. North Korea conducted a nuclear bomb test, its second, in May, and has conducted several missile tests since then. The United Nations responded by tightening and expanding sanctions on the North.
The two nations were on opposite sides in the 1950-1953 Korean War and had no regular contacts before a 1994 crisis over North Korea's nuclear program. North Korea agreed at that time to halt the development of nuclear weapons, but abandoned that accord and withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003.
Clinton had considered visiting North Korea in 2000 near the end of his second term as president. His secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, had gone to Pyongyang in early 2000 to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il -- now widely reported to be ill.
(CNN) -- Former U.S. President Bill Clinton landed in North Korea early Tuesday on a mission to negotiate the release of two American journalists imprisoned there since March, according to the country's state news agency and a CNN source.
The North Korean news agency KCNA did not disclose the purpose of the visit in its three-line dispatch. But a source with detailed knowledge of the former president's movements told CNN late Monday that Clinton was going to seek the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, both reporters for California-based Current TV -- media venture launched by Clinton's former vice president, Al Gore.
Meeting Clinton were the vice president of North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly, Yang Hyong Sop, and Kim Kye Gwan, the vice foreign minister, KCNA reported, adding that "a little girl presented a bouquet to Bill Clinton."
The women were arrested while reporting on the border between North Korea and China and sentenced in June to 12 years in prison on charges of entering the country illegally to conduct a smear campaign.
Since the United States has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, efforts to resolve the issue so far have been handled through Sweden, which represents U.S. interests in the reclusive communist state.
Watch what may lie behind the pick of Bill Clinton »
Last month, Clinton's wife -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- said the Obama administration had dropped its request for Ling and Lee to be released on humanitarian grounds and instead was seeking amnesty, which implies forgiveness for an offense.
Clinton's mission comes as the United States and its allies in the region are trying to push North Korea back into stalled nuclear disarmament talks. North Korea conducted a nuclear bomb test, its second, in May, and has conducted several missile tests since then. The United Nations responded by tightening and expanding sanctions on the North.
The two nations were on opposite sides in the 1950-1953 Korean War and had no regular contacts before a 1994 crisis over North Korea's nuclear program. North Korea agreed at that time to halt the development of nuclear weapons, but abandoned that accord and withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003.
Clinton had considered visiting North Korea in 2000 near the end of his second term as president. His secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, had gone to Pyongyang in early 2000 to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il -- now widely reported to be ill.
Friday, July 24, 2009
N. Korea: Clinton 'funny lady, by no means intelligent'
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/07/23/us.north.korea/index.html
BANGKOK, Thailand (CNN) -- North Korea launched a scathing personal attack on U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday after she likened the leadership in Pyongyang to "small children and unruly teenagers and people who are demanding attention."
Hillary Clinton says N. Korea's refusal to discuss nuclear program could provoke arms race.
1 of 2
At a meeting of southeast Asian nations in Phuket, Thailand, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman blasted Clinton for what he called a "spate of vulgar remarks unbecoming for her position everywhere she went since she was sworn in," according to the state-run KCNA news agency.
The spokesman called Clinton "by no means intelligent" and a "funny lady."
"Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping," the statement said. Read other colorful insults by N. Korea
The verbal tussle between the two countries culminated with the reclusive communist state making it clear that six-party nuclear talks, stalled for over a year, were effectively finished.
Clinton had earlier warned that North Korea's refusal to discuss its nuclear program could escalate tensions and provoke an arms race in northeast Asia. 
"I was gratified by how many countries from throughout the region spoke up and expressed directly to theNorth Korea delegation their concerns over the provocative behavior we have seen over the last few months," Clinton said at a meeting of southeast Asian nations in Phuket, Thailand.
"Unfortunately, the North Korean delegation offered only an insistent refusal to recognize that North Korea has been on the wrong course," she said. "They expressed no willingness to pursue the path of denuclearization. In their presentation today, they evinced no willingness to pursue the path of denuclearization, and that was troubling not only to the United States, but to the region and the international community."
Don't Miss
Her remarks came after the North Koreans issued their blunt statement in response to Clinton's interview earlier in the week with ABC News.
Before Clinton's remarks in Phuket on Thursday, the North Korean delegation attempted to take the podium to speak to the media. But it was turned away by security guards.
North Korea tested a nuclear device in May and fired seven ballistic missiles earlier this month in defiance of a U.N. resolution.
At the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting, Clinton said she had unanimous support for U.N. Resolution 1874, passed by the Security Council in June. It tightened sanctions on North Korea, imposing an embargo on the shipment of arms from that nation.
The North protested the resolution by saying it would enrich uranium and weaponize plutonium, according to KCNA. When enriched to a high degree, uranium can be used as weapons-grade material. Plutonium can be used in atomic bombs.
Clinton said the United States will continue to push North Korea to come to the table. She said a "full normalization of relationships" was possible if North Korea agreed to a verifiable dismantling of its nuclear program.
"The United States and its allies and partners cannot accept a North Korea that tries to maintain nuclear weapons, to launch ballistic missiles or to proliferate nuclear materials," Clinton said. "We are committed to the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula in a peaceful manner."
The United States has also expressed concern that military cooperation between North Korea and Myanmar could destabilize the region.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)