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Body snatching, North Korean
style
By Andrei Lankov
SEOUL - An old photo, taken in 1974,
recently was smuggled from North Korea. It depicts
a group of men, mostly in their 20s and 30s,
against the background of Myohyangsan Mountain, a
famed North Korean resort. They look like a
typical group of North Korean "model workers" who
were rewarded with a government-paid tour for their
hard work and devotion to the Great Leader and
founding father, Kim Il-sung. But this is not the
case: all these people are South Korean fishermen
whose boats had been intercepted on the seas and
who were taken to the North.
South
Korea, currently engaged in a bewildering love-fest
with its misunderstood North Korean brethren, has
no official comment - any critical comment
might complicate delicate relations. Over the years,
the North has kidnapped fishermen, teenagers
on beaches, activists, a pastor in China, a
schoolteacher, at least one diplomat and assorted other
South Koreans.
North Korean spy agencies
love kidnappings. Of course, many of their
colleagues worldwide also would not mind abducting
a person or two, but in most cases there are
perceived urgent reasons for such dramatic
actions: the victims are prominent opposition
leaders, or wanted criminals who cannot be
extradited through normal channels, or people who
are unlucky enough to know something way too
important to be allowed freedom of movement or
speech.
North Korean abductions are
different: they are often surprisingly random and
target people of no apparent significance. The
very randomness of most abductions once was cited
by skeptics who used to rebut these accusations as
"Seoul-inspired falsities". Indeed, why should the
secret services of a Stalinist state spend time
and money to kidnap a Japanese noodle chef or a
tennis-loving teenager? Nonetheless, in 2002 none
other than Kim Jong-il himself, the Dear Leader
and son of the founder, confirmed that these
seemingly meaningless abductions of average
Japanese men and women did take place.
Of course, North Korean spies did
not limit themselves to the Japanese. The
North Koreans began to snatch their own dissenters, who
were abducted from the Soviet Union and other
communist countries in the 1950s and 1960s. Then
they applied their new experience and skills to a
wider choice of targets, including, of course,
South Koreans. It is known that at least 486
South Koreans have been forcibly taken to the North
and never returned. The statistics do not include
a large number of North Korean refugees who were
abducted from China over the past decade.
There are a few
major groups of South Korean abductees: fishermen, navy
personnel, passengers and crews of hijacked
planes. The abductees also include a number of
known victims of covert operations. Currently they
are said number 17, but there are few doubts that
the actual number is much higher. If the abduction
is planned and conducted well, the victim simply
disappears and is sooner or later presumed dead.
A good example is the case of five
South Korean high-school students who disappeared from
island beaches in 1977-78. They all were believed
dead (presumably drowned) for two decades, but in
the late 1990s it was discovered that the
youngsters were working in North Korea as
instructors, introducing would-be undercover North
Korean operatives to the basics of South Korean
culture and lifestyle.
It is remarkable
that the kidnappings of these South Korean
students roughly coincided with similar abductions
in Japan. In both cases the abductors obviously
targeted randomly selected teenagers who were
unlucky enough to be on a lonely beach, and in
both cases abductees were later used to train
espionage agents. Perhaps teenagers were seen as
ideal would-be instructors for the spies: still
susceptible to indoctrination but with enough
knowledge of local realities to be useful. But one
cannot help but wonder how many teenagers who have
been presumed drowned or lost in the Korean
Peninsula's mountain wilderness were actually
taken to North Korea. And how many of them have
survived to this day?
Quite
a few kidnappings took place overseas. In April
1979 a young South Korean walked into the
North Korean Embassy in Oslo. His name was Ko
Sang-mu, and he was a schoolteacher back home. Why and how
it happened is not clear. As was usually the case,
the North Korean side insisted that Ko had
defected, while the South Koreans alleged that the
young teacher became a victim of a taxi driver's
mistake: he took a taxi to a "Korean embassy" and
the driver delivered him to the embassy of the
wrong Korea.
It is impossible to
say now whether this highly publicized case
was abduction, defection or something in between.
However, in 1994 it became known that Ko was in a
labor camp. A small propaganda war ensued. Ko was
made to appear in North Korean
broadcasts assuring everybody that he was free, happily
married and full of righteous hatred for the
US imperialists and their Seoul puppets (most of
his speech consisted of standard
anti-American rhetoric). We do not know where he went
after delivering this speech: to an apartment
in Pyongyang or to a dugout in a prison camp, but
the latter option appears more likely. Meanwhile,
Ko's widow in the South committed suicide, unable
to cope with the stress of the situation.
There were also more convenient cases of
abduction: the North Koreans kidnapped the people
who possessed important intelligence. In 1971 Yu
Song-gun, a South Korean diplomat stationed in
West Germany was kidnapped in West Berlin together
with his wife and their two children. Perhaps a
few other South Korean officials who went missing
in Europe in the 1970s also were abducted by the
North Korean agents, but on that stage only Yu's
case is certain.
In the
1990s most abductions of this sort took place in
China, and the victims were political
activists, missionaries and real or suspected South Korean
spies. All these abductions occurred in
China's northeast, near the North Korean border. Recently,
the South Korean government finally admitted
that pastor Kim Tong-sik, involved in aiding
North Korean refugees in China, was kidnapped by
North Korean agents in January 2000. He was
transported to North Korea, where the intelligence
officers tried to extract necessary information -
presumably by applying good old Stalinist
interrogation technique on him. The pastor died.
But a vast majority - 90% of the confirmed
cases or 435 out of 486 abductees - are fishermen
who were taken to the North with their vessels
after they were intercepted at sea by the North
Korean navy. After such incidents, the North
Koreans usually insisted that the vessel had
deliberately trespassed the demarcation line
between the two Koreas, while the South Korean
side either denied this or asserted that the
trespassing had been an innocent navigational
mistake. It's not possible to say who was
responsible for a particular skirmish, especially
since the navigational techniques available to
Korean fishermen back in the 1960s and 1970s left
much to be desired.
In some cases
the captured crews were eventually repatriated,
but often Pyongyang alleged that at least a few
crew members had "chosen to stay in the
socialist paradise and not to go to the living hell of
the capitalist South". In some cases this may
have been true, while in many others it was a blatant
lie. This is a usual problem with
abductions/defections. When such an incident
happens, South Korean authorities and family
members of an abductee have the incentive to
present the incident as a kidnapping while the
North Korean side insists that the person in
question had defected voluntarily. One suspects
that even in future it will be impossible to find
out the truth with absolute certainty: human
motivations can be mixed. There will be new
pressures as well: in post-Kim Jong-il Korea, few
people will be ready to admit that they or their
close friends once voluntarily defected to the
Stalinist regime.
The first known
interception of a fishing ship took place in May
1955. The most recent incident happened in 1987,
when 12 South Koreans became prisoners in the
North. During subsequent interceptions the crews
were always repatriated.
In 1969 a Korean
Air Lines plane was hijacked in the air. Most of
the South Koreans were repatriated, but 12 crew
members and passengers were held in the North.
Eventually, two stewardesses became announcers of
the North Korean propaganda broadcasts that target
South Korean audiences. Indeed, this radio station
employs a number of abductees.
Generally North Korean authorities wanted to utilize
the knowledge and skills of their abductees.
Of course, the fishermen hardly had access
to valuable intelligence, but they still could
be trained as spies and sent back to the South.
They were also used for training North
Korean intelligence operatives. Better-educated people
could be employed by the institutions responsible
for waging propaganda campaigns against the South
in, say, their broadcast facilities.
Most
of the abductees were dispatched to work somewhere
in the countryside. Some led lives that could be
described as normal or even successful, at least
by North Korean standards. For example, Kim
Pyong-do, whose boat was intercepted in November
1974, was forced to stay in the North, where he
became a factory worker. Eventually he became a
foreman, was decorated with a medal for
exceptional work, and otherwise had a life not so
very different from that of the average North
Korean worker. In 2003 he crossed the border into
China and returned home. Others were much less
lucky. There have been reports about the abductees
sent to the prison camps as "unmasked spies" or
reactionaries (the story of Ko Sang-mu being one
of many examples).
But one cannot help
but wonder why not much is heard about the
abduction issue in Seoul. After all, there have been fewer
than 60 Japanese abductees - even if one believes
the highest available estimate. Nonetheless, the
issue is central to Japanese politics and stirs
high emotions in Tokyo. Meanwhile, only family
members and some right-wing groups seem to care
about South Koreans who disappeared in Pyongyang.
What's the matter?
This
reflects the general approach to the North in
present-day South Korea. The abduction issue used to be
much cited by the official propaganda of the
military regimes in the 1960s and 1970s, but
middle-aged Koreans are seriously (and, one suspects, incurably)
allergic to anything that reminds them of this
propaganda. The political left, which increasingly
dominates South Korean internal discourse, is
remarkably positive toward the North. The logic
is simple: if one raises uncomfortable issues with
the North, this is unlikely to help, but will make
things more complicated instead. As the left-wing
journalists love to say, "Development needs come
first, and human rights second." This might well
be true, but the same ideologues are ignited when
similar logic is applied to the authoritarian
regimes of South Korea's own past (even if South
Korean strongmen, unlike the North Korean dynastic
rulers, delivered truly exceptional economic
growth and even if the human-rights violations in
the military-ruled South were of immeasurably
smaller scale). This can be described as betrayal
of political freedom committed by the South Korean
left - but admittedly, throughout the world's
history freedom has been sacrificed to political
expediency, both by the left and by the right, a
countless number of times.
It is important
to note, however, that the isolated attempts to
raise the issue are largely ignored by the general
South Korean public, or at least by the majority.
They want to nurture their newly acquired
illusions about the North. According to the
current prevailing mood, North Korea should be
seen as a tragically misunderstood brother in need
of help, not as a cruel kidnapper of teenagers or
torturer of priests on humanitarian missions.
These illusions are likely to continue for a
while, even if many more photos are smuggled out
of the North.
Dr Andrei Lankov
is a lecturer in the faculty of Asian
Studies, China and Korea Center, Australian National
University. He graduated from Leningrad State
University with a PhD in Far Eastern history and
China, with emphasis on Korea, and his thesis
focused on factionalism in the Yi Dynasty. He has
published books and articles on Korea and North
Asia. He is currently on leave, teaching at the
Kookmin University, Seoul.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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