The Marmot’s Hole

The Grand National Party — on another one of their unscheduled vacations — is urging the government to press North Korea to release a South Korean pastor abducted from China in 2000:

The opposition Grand National Party (GNP) on Tuesday urged the government to press Pyongyang for the release of South Korean pastor Kim Dong-shik, who was abducted by North Korean agents in China more than four years ago.

“The Unification Ministry and other related government offices should actively try to confirm whether he is still alive, and seek the repatriation of all South Koreans who have been abducted by the North,” Rep. Park Kye-dong of the GNP told The Korea Times.

Park’s colleague Kim Moon-soo also said in a press release that this type of forceful abduction is a “grave crime” which cannot be tolerated.

“The North Korean government must apologize and immediately release Rev. Kim,” he said, while requesting the Seoul government to take all steps possible to push for his release.

The opposition’s call comes after the Seoul Central District Public Prosecutors Office said it had indicted on Saturday an ethnic Korean man who had played a key role in the kidnapping of Kim in January 2000. At the time, Kim was assisting North Korean refugees in Yanji, Jilin Province.

The ethnic Korean from China indicted was a one Yu (Ryu) Young-hwa, an employee of North Korea’s State Safety and Security Agency who was working at a construction site in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea when he was busted Saturday:

Seoul Central District Public Prosecutors’ Office, which detained the kidnapper Saturday, issued an official confirmation Tuesday. “It has been confirmed that 35-year-old Yoo Young-hwa, who kidnapped Kim, is a Chinese-born ethnic Korean agent with North Korea’s State Safety and Security Agency,” disclosed spokesmen.

Yoo admitted to being an agent of the clandestine unit during a hearing at Seoul District Court on Saturday during which charges were brought against him in relation to Kim’s kidnapping.

Commenting on Yoo’s identity, a public security official with the prosecutors’ office said that, “He was an ethnic Korean from China, but he was also a ‘North Korean agent’ who received instructions and operational funds from the North. He frequently went back and forth between China and North Korea, and was tasked with catching and forcefully repatriating North Korean defectors and the go-betweens helping them in China.”

A little background on the Kim Dong-shik abduction, from Durihana:

Reverend Dong Shik Kim (pictured), a South Korean pastor, with serious disabilities, witnessed firsthand the sad plight of the North Koreans who fled their country. He moved to China and became very involved in helping the North Korean people, advocating for their human rights and providing humanitarian aid for their immediate needs.

Rev. Kim taught North Korean refugees the gospel, training them to be disciples of the Lord Jesus. He translated the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John into the dialect of the North Koreans and sent these Bible booklets into North Korea. Unfortunately the North Korean authorities misinterpreted his religious activities as efforts to subvert the North Korean government.

On 16th January 2000, after a Sunday service in Younbyun city, three secret agents from North Korea told Rev. Kim that they would guide him to a new refugee couple. Rev. Kim served the men lunch and followed them. He has not been seen since.

An eyewitness told Mrs. Kim that he had seen her husband being interrogated in a prison in Musan, in which prisoners are placed in boiling springs during interrogation.

All of Rev. Kim s eight children, five of whom are adopted and the youngest of whom is 12, eagerly hope for the safe return of their father. However, no one knows whether he is alive or dead.

Kim isn’t the only South Korean man of the cloth abducted to the Workers’ Paradise — Rev. Ahn Seung-woon was abducted in 1995 while he was working in China.

Anyway, back to Kim’s case, the Unification Ministry doesn’t appear to be so enthusiastic about making this an issue:

The Unification Ministry, however, said it has insufficient evidence of Kim’s abduction to bring up the issue with the North at this stage.

“We don’t have substantial proof on this case and we can’t focus solely on it because there are numerous other abduction cases to deal with,” a ministry official said. “But we could possibly try to reach some sort of package deal with the North later if an appropriate chance comes.”

A total of 468 cases of abducted South Koreans had been reported to the government as of December this year, the official said.

OK, before we chalk this up to craven appeasement on the part of the Roh administration, I think a comment over at NKzone by the always insightful Dr. Andrei Lankov about the Megumi Yokota case may be worth examining:

It’s a thing always perplex me in the Westerners (and Japanese are Westerners): they are so alien to the “normal” logic of a really cruel dictatorship which is not constrained neither by public opinion nor by some aristocratic restraints. The North Koreans lied about Megumi’s death, it was almost clear from their account. And now Japanese badly want her bones? Don’t they understand that if they persist, they will indeed get bones. Real ones, albeit a bit too fresh, perhaps. It’s very easy to make a living person (and Megumi is probably still alive) into a skeleton, don’t they know? Or do they expect them to handle her back? But God knows how much she knows especially if she was directly involved in spy training or something like it.

Now, if I actually believed that this was the intention behind the Roh administration’s silence on this issue, I could understand it. Wouldn’t agree with it, but at least I could understand the rationale behind it. Unfortunately, in conjunction with some of the other Ministry of Unification statements concerning defector issues, I have a feeling that there are other motivations involved.

Anyway, readers may wish to read a very moving letter from 2001 written by Rev. Kim’s wife, Esther Kim, who was suffering from cancer at the time.