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Category: Abductions

August 14, 2008

North Korea’s Next Tantrum

A  shoe is about to drop, but  which shoe?  Among Washington’s Korea-watching klatsch, there’s a popular parlor game that goes like this: DOVE:  The North Koreans are proud, fanatical, and emotional.  You have to be careful not to antagonize them with idle talk about human rights and  intrusive verification or you’ll spoil the negotiations.  And we’re this close (thumb and index finger a milimeter apart) to a breakthrough. HAWK:  The North Koreans are calculating and react  with malice aforethought.  Their...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
July 24, 2008

For the Thousandth Time, Secretary Rice, We Are Not Giving Up Our Nukes.

Somehow, I don’t think Condi Rice’s “‘very strong message’ about [North Korea’s] nuclear disarmament obligations” quite got through: North Korea reportedly asked to be recognized as a nuclear state at a meeting of foreign ministers from countries in six-party talks on Wednesday. North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui-chun urged the U.S. to stop its hostile policy toward the North, saying verification of the nuclear facilities and stockpiles it has declared is not a duty but cooperation. [Chosun Ilbo] Somewhere, Jack...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
July 9, 2008

Obama ‘Pivots’ Positions on N. Korea Terror De-Listing

The New York Sun picks up the story of Kim Dong Shik and Barack Obama’s first broken promise: In an interview yesterday, the executive director of the Korean Church Coalition for North Korean Freedom, Sam Kim, said he traveled to Congress in early June to remind Illinois legislators of a 2005 letter signed by Senator Obama, among others, that called on the North Korean regime to provide details about the case of the Reverend Kim Dong-Shik. Rev. Kim, who helped...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
July 1, 2008

Oops, We Changed the Wrong Regime

People can differ about the merits of overthrowing noxious regimes and the various ways that can be pursued, but I’m guessing this is one item Condoleezza Rice wasn’t pursuing for her legacy showcase: Rice’s sudden turnabout on de-listing North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism may soon plunge the Japanese government into crisis. Japan must now decide whether to join the United States in providing aid to a country that kidnaps and refuses to account for unknown numbers of...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Japan/Japan & Korea/Six-Party Talks
June 25, 2008

Paroled from Death, Or Worse

The anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s invasion of South Korea is a fitting time to post about just the latest Ssouth Korean prisoner of war to return home after being held in North Korea  since a 1953  Armistice agreement in  it agreed to  return  its prisoners.    A prisoner of war (POW) escaped from North Korea 55 years after being captured and is currently staying in China awaiting entry to South Korea, the association of abductees’ family members said Tuesday. ...

Categories Abductions/Korean War
June 20, 2008

Why Should We Believe Chris Hill?

Chris Hill is the man in whom Congress will have to invest its trust if it decides to throw away America’s leverage and let the State Department de-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism this summer.  The terms of Hill’s deal with Kim Jong Il are  so  hopelessly vague  and endlessly flexible  that the viability of this whole process rests on two  thin  and brittle reeds: Kim Jong Il’s good faith and  Chris Hill’s veracity.   Enough said?  If not,...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Refugees/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
June 20, 2008

How Much More Don’t We Know?

There are two  unfolding enigmas  from that black hole of disappearing humanity known as North Korea this week.  The L.A. Times  catches us up on the rumors that North Korea may soon “discover” that, notwithstanding years of denials, it may have some more Japanese abductees after all.  I wonder how many Yen this will cost the Japanese  in ransom reparations.  Wouldn’t that make this, you know, terrorism? The second story involves an American who has been missing since the Korean...

Categories Abductions/China/Korean War/Uncategorized
June 19, 2008

Who Remembers Kim Dong Shik? Answer: The Washington Post, Barack Obama, and Condoleezza Rice

Regular readers know that I’ve been a persistent critic of politicians of both parties who would  politicize and trivialize two  essential and  long-standing principles of American national security policy:  the intolerance of state terrorism, and the intolerance of proliferation.  North Korea’s refusal to be bound by any norms of  human civilization tempts a certain  class of politician to simply exempt North Korea from those principles.  Notwithstanding President Bush’s hawkish and mostly empty  words, his administration is about to  do exactly...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
June 1, 2008

Two More Japanese Escape from N. Korea

The Asahi Shimbun reported on the 26th that a Japanese woman and her 40-year-old son, both of whom defected from North Korea, are being sheltered by the authorities in Jilin, China. The 73-year-old woman, from Sendai in Japan, migrated to North Korea after her husband joined the Chongryon (General Association of North Korean Residents in Japan) in 1967, and defected from North Korea, reportedly due to the famine, across the Tumen River this spring. According to the Japanese newspaper, while...

Categories Abductions/Japan & Korea
May 30, 2008

Documentary: Secret Victims

[Update: The link was bad before; fixed now.]This is the second of two documentaries by Journeyman Productions I’m featuring here. This one, an Australian production, deals with South Koreans who are abducted to the North and the unconscionable way various South Korean governments through the years have treated them and their families — either as presumptive spies (under rightist regimes) or as irritants to the Unifiction (under leftist ones). Although the docu was made in 2003, it nonetheless features plenty...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement
May 29, 2008

NK Hints More Japanese Abductees May Be Freed

The Japanese NGO ReACH, which advocates on behalf of the families of Japanese abducted by the North Korean regime, is active in Washington D.C. and sometimes sends me e-mails with interesting information.  Today, they inform me that the award-winning “Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story” will air on the PBS program Independent Lens on Tuesday, June 19th, at 10 p.m. Eastern.  (If anyone can find links for listings in their local areas, I’d appreciate it if you’d post them in the...

Categories Abductions/Japan & Korea
April 30, 2008

State Dep’t Releases Annual Terrorism Report

And North Korea clings to it by a hair: The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987. The DPRK continued to harbor four Japanese Red Army members who participated in a jet hijacking in 1970. The Japanese government continued to seek a full accounting of the fate of the 12 Japanese nationals believed to have been abducted by DPRK state entities; five...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/Terrorism (NK)
March 25, 2008

S. Korea (Sort of) Links Humanitarian Aid to Return of Abductees

South Korea’s president has asked North Korea to consider sending home prisoners of war and captured civilians in return for receiving humanitarian aid from Seoul. President Lee Myung-bak said in an interview published Monday that he wouldn’t seek to link food and fertilizer aid to international efforts to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs. “Still, since we are sending humanitarian aid, the North should consider humanitarian measures, without any condition, on the pending issue of South Korean PoWs and 400...

Categories Abductions/Famine & Food Aid/Korean War
March 6, 2008

We’re screwing up the U.S.-Japanese alliance … but what for?

On the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, Kyoko Nakayama, a Special Advisor to the Prime Minister of Japan, tries”>tries to keep America’s attention on  an issue the Bush Administration wants you to forget.  If South Korea care about its abductees as much as Japan does about its abductees, a lot more of them  might be free.  Of course, if the United States cared as much about Japan’s abductees as it once pretended to, it would not have done such lasting...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Japan
February 4, 2008

N. Korea Demands Japan Drop Abductions Issue

Does this sound like a nation that has renounced terrorism? North Korea-Japan relations will never improve if Japan continues to link their improvement with a bilateral dispute over North Korea’s past abductions of Japanese nationals, North Korea’s state-run media said Thursday. In a lengthy commentary, the Korean Central News Agency said that North Korea has not forgiven Japan for forcing many Korean women into sexual slavery and taking many Korean men to Japan during World War II, and that it...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Japan & Korea/Terrorism (NK)
January 12, 2008

South Korea to push U.N. for return of its POW’s

President-Elect Lee Myung Bak’s transition team  is speaking more about its plans to finally bring home about 560 prisoners of war  it believes North Korea is still holding, in violation of the 1953 Armistice agreement.  South Korea may seek help from the international community in pressing North Korea to return South Korean prisoners of war, the Defense Ministry said Saturday.   North Korea has so far balked at South Korean requests to return POWs, saying it has never held any South...

Categories "United" Nations/Abductions/Korean War
January 10, 2008

One less ransom to pay

One of the 264 people listed by a civic group as possibly abducted by North Korea was found safe in Japan last month, the group investigating North Korea’s abductions of Japanese citizens said Tuesday. According to the Investigation Commission on Missing Japanese Probably Related to North Korea, the 48-year-old man from Akita Prefecture went missing in 1981 from a place where he was working part-time in Yamato, Kanagawa Prefecture. [Kyodo News] I understand that Bill Richardson  has already  claimed credit...

Categories Abductions/WTF?