(CNSNews.com) – The reported detention of two American journalists by North Korean security officials comes at a time of heightened tensions in the region, raising concerns that Pyongyang may use them as bargaining chips in its attempts to win concessions from the U.S.
Pyongyang’s rhetoric towards the U.S. and South Korea has grown increasingly antagonistic in recent weeks, angered by joint military exercise between the two allies and by international opposition to its rocket launch plans for early next month.
North Korea says it will put a satellite into orbit; the U.S. suspects it will test an advanced ballistic missile – one which U.S. Forces Korea head Gen. Walter Sharp told a Senate hearing Thursday was “capable of striking Okinawa, Guam and Alaska.”
Both the U.S. and Japan militaries have warned that they will intercept the rocket if threatened. North Korea says any interception will be tantamount to a declaration of war.
In other actions showing its displeasure it has cut inter-Korean communication links, closed the access route to a joint North-South industrial complex several miles north of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) – effectively holding hundreds of South Korean workers hostage there – and told the U.S. to stop providing food aid, despite severe food shortages. Multilateral efforts aimed at resolving a long running dispute over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programs remain stalled.
The reported detention of two U.S. journalists and their guide as they filmed along the North Korea-China border has added a new element to an already tense situation as the Obama administration mulls how to deal with the reclusive Stalinist regime.
The two women have been identified in South Korean news reports as Euna Lee and Laura Ling, staffers with the San Francisco-based Current TV, an online video news service set up by Al Gore.
Their exact whereabouts when arrested are unclear. Some reports say they were on Chinese soil, filming across the Tumen River which separates China from north-east North Korea. Others suggest they had strayed into North Korean territory.
State Department spokesman Robert Wood said the U.S. was trying to obtain more details about the case, and would do so through the Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang. In the absence of diplomatic relations, Sweden looks after U.S. consular interests in North Korea.
“When you have, you know, two American citizens who are being held against their will, we want to try to find out all the facts and try to … gain their release,” he told a press briefing.
It is believed to be the first time North Korea has held foreign journalists. In 1994 North Korean forces downed a U.S. helicopter which the Pentagon said had strayed by error across the DMZ during a routine training mission. One pilot was killed and another held for 13 days. Two years later, an American man was held for three months, accused of espionage, after he had swum across another border river, the Yalu.
The incidents required direct intervention to secure the release of the Americans, in both cases undertaken at President Clinton’s request by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, then a congressman.
A conservative South Korean daily, Chosun Ilbo, said Friday the latest incident may lead to the first direct negotiations between North Korea and the Obama administration. If so, it could be an opportunity for Pyongyang to abandon the hard line stance it has adopted in recent months.
On the other hand, the paper said, “if it holds them for a long time, resorting to their ridiculous tactic of accusing them of being ‘spies,’ the only result would be an increase in negative sentiment toward the North among the American public.”
Refugees, abductions
The Tumen and Yalu rivers, both of which lie along the 880 mile-long border with China, are common crossing points for North Koreans who flee their impoverished homeland, often hoping eventually to reach South Korea, Japan or other countries.
As China refuses to recognize them as refugees requiring protection under U.N. conventions, human rights advocates say the North Koreans risk forced repatriation and, on their return, face imprisonment in labor camps or even execution.
According to a South Korean missionary organization which works with North Korean refugees, the detained journalists were aiming to interview refugees who were hiding in China.
In 2000, a South Korean pastor who was helping North Korean refugees inside China disappeared in the border area. A South Korean court later established that Kim Dong-Shik, a permanent resident of the U.S., had been abducted by North Korean agents inside China. He is believed to have died while incarcerated inside North Korea.
Kim was a resident of Illinois, and in 2005, then Illinois Sen. Barack Obama joined most of his state’s congressional colleagues in signing a letter to the North Korean mission to the U.N., demanding a full accounting of Kim’s fate before they would support North Korea’s removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Last year, when the Bush administration was mulling removing North Korea from the list, Obama – then campaigning for president – came under fire from North Korean human rights advocates when he appeared to back away from that 2005 ultimatum, by dropping news on Kim’s fate as a condition for supporting the delisting move.
When President Bush in October announced his eventual decision to remove North Korea from the list, Obama in a statement called the step “appropriate.”
“Looking ahead,” he said, “North Korea must also resolve all questions about the abduction of Japanese and South Korean citizens, and of the Reverend Kim Dong-Shik. I urge the Bush administration to continue to use our diplomatic and economic leverage to press North Korea to cooperate fully with Tokyo, Seoul and Washington on these matters.”