Journalists Convicted in N.Korea Get 12 Years
As if two weeks of rising tensions on the peninsula were not creating enough of a sensation, the North Korean regime has concluded their trial today of two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Both were arrested under unknown circumstances in March at the North Korean border with China.
BREAKING: Both Current TV journalists were convicted today of ”hostile acts” and illegal entry against the North Korean regime and now each faces a sentence of up to 12 years hard labor in a brutal penal camp system known the world over as lacking even the most fundamental human rights.
Foreign policy experts and North Korea watchers are not surprised to see this outcome, since the two journalists present the Kim Jong-il regime with useful bargaining chips for whatever may come.
On June 4, Al Gore, the founder of Current TV, was reportedly making plans to visit North Korea and negotiate a release. However, yesterday, he was criticized for making bad jokes amid the crisis during a public appearance in New York. After the outcome was made public today, he and his company have so far been silent on the matter.
As stated earlier at Ratemyhagwon, it might be time to bring in a heavyweight negotiator in the form of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who has a solid record on freeing American prisoners.
In the meantime, Ling and Lee’s imprisonment adds another dimension to the already complex situation on the peninsula. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called the conviction ”baseless and unfounded,” and President Obama has stood firm against “rewarding provocation.”
If the women are released, it would be the first case of this kind since Evan C. Hunziker swam across the Yalu River on a drunken dare in 1996. He was promptly arrested, tried as a spy, but released after intervention by then-Representative Bill Richardson.
But as it stands now, Ling and Lee could be the first foreigners to spend any significant time in a North Korean prison since Ali Lamada and Jacques Sedillot were imprisoned in the 1970s. They would certainly become the first American women to be imprisoned.
If little has changed since the 1970s, and some believe it might have gotten worse after the famines of the 1990s, the two women face a primitive and repressive ”kyo-hwa-so,” or a long term prison labor camp. Under the guise of ‘re-education’ these Stalin-era gulags extract slave labor under starvation-level rations, back-breaking conditions, and physical brutality from both guards and between prisoners.
This has been well documented by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, which collected witness testimonies from former prisoners who defected and issued a report called, Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps.
Detailed reads:
[Hidden Gulag, download the entire report in PDF]
[NY Times]
[Chosun]
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