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Demonstrators hold hands at a rally on the steps of City Hall in San Francisco, June 3, to protest against North Korea. Pyongyang’s highest court sentenced two American journalists to 12 years in a labor camp for entering the country illegally and engaging in “hostile acts.” Laura Ling and Euna Lee, reporters for former Vice President Al Gore’s California-based Current TV media venture, were detained March 17 near the North Korean border while on a reporting trip to China. / AP-Yonhap |
By Tom Plate
LOS ANGELES ― Call me a dupe of the Commies, if that makes you happy ― I really don't care at this point. Maybe all these years I have been wrong to argue that we can negotiate with North Korea; maybe my critics are right and the regime does need to be either totally ignored and further isolated, or, in the worst case scenario, attacked.
All I care about right now is getting those two American journalists out of that Pyongyang jail.
The two women were recently sentenced to years of hard labor for alleged espionage against North Korea. Back in March, you see, they were standing (1) near or (2) on or (3) slightly inside the border between China and North Korea, working on a story for their San Francisco-based cable and internet station, co-owned and most prominently fronted by Al Gore, former U.S. vice president.
Before the journalists knew it, North Korean border guards grabbed them, threw them in prison and charged them with high crimes. Fairness, justice and a sense of proportion are not qualities the world has grown to expect from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
That area of the border is miles from military sites, not to mention the Communist country's capital, Pyongyang.
American hawks on the North Korean issue will view this latest cruel act of state as further proof that, for this regime, the best diplomacy bashes with sticks and offers no carrots: Reasoning with the regime is a fool's errand.
And the fools are sillies like me who have campaigned for the six-party talks on Korean Peninsula disarmament, insisting that no rational alternative to negotiation exists. Do we really want to go to war?
To be sure, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, the two sentenced journalists, are probably viewed by Pyongyang's deep thinkers as bargaining chips whose grandiose release would shower them with U.S. concessions of some kind. But here they may have greatly miscalculated.
The Obama administration cannot afford to be seen as kowtowing to blackmail, especially with Iran and other difficult regimes watching the unfolding drama carefully. That would risk encouraging other evil actors to try to parlay some similar cruel ploy.
The Obama administration's room to maneuver is limited, but it's not for those of us outside of government who also care about the plight of these relative youngsters. We need to do what we can to get them sprung.
Some of their colleagues and friends have organized petition drives; others have been working private lines to Pyongyang. Journalists have been writing articles and editorials and columns (there have been two from me already).
I feel involved in this mess not just because one of the journalists was a former star student of mine but also because of my long advocacy of trying to negotiate directly with that government, however tortuous the process.
But now Pyongyang has made everyone wonder: Is this regime simply totally out of its mind? If these journalists are not soon released, as a gesture of international responsibility, not in the cause of cheap blackmailing, the ranks of those Americans who have no hope at all for this regime will grow exponentially, as will the call for military action.
In history's ledgers, Pyongyang's leaders might want to recall, it is often seemingly little incidents (like this stupid imprisonment) that trigger large and violent wars. Remember in 2006 Hamas snatched one Israeli soldier, helping trigger, rightly or wrongly, retaliatory hell in Lebanon and Gaza.
And if the force option seems implausible to Pyongyang, its leaders need only recall the 2003 near-unilateral American invasion of Iraq, not to mention the 2007 unilateral Israeli military air strike on a budding Syrian nuclear site using clandestine North Korean technology.
Perhaps North Korea can be induced to listen to reason. If so, I would be perfectly willing (as I am sure would almost any equally concerned American journalist) to travel to Pyongyang ― to go as a long-time Asia columnist and private citizen (not bankrolled by any government, much less in the clandestine employ of the CIA) to help facilitate the ladies' release.
The North Koreans must be made to see the light. One hopes that the (presumably) wiser heads at the very top of this government recognize their underlings' miscalculation in snatching the ladies.
The relevant parties in North Korea and elsewhere know how to get in touch with me. Send the signal, and I am there, in Pyongyang, whenever it is requested.
In fact, I want to be asked, to do whatever I can to save these well-intentioned American journalists from further misery ― as well as to salvage my decades-old hypothesis that negotiating with North Korea is not stupid.
Prove me wrong, Pyongyang, or prove me right. It's your move.
Career journalist Tom Plate, an American university professor for 14 years and author of ``Confessions of an American Media Man," has written six books, and has published columns on the Korean Peninsula going back to 1996. He can be reached at platcolumn@gmail.com.
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