|
Kim Young-nam and four other South Koreans kidnapped in 1977-8 when they were high school students are alive in North Korea and working to train North Korean spies on how to pass for South Korean, National Intelligence Service Director Kim Seung-kyu said Thursday. The NIS chief said this was confirmed by testimony from North Korean agents arrested in South Korea in 1997 and North Koreans who defected since 2000. Yet in recent inter-Korean ministerial level talks, the government did not raise the matter of these abduction victims, the NIS said. The parents of the five, on hearing that their children who were not heard from for 30 years are alive, are said to have asked why on earth the government did not tell them until now.
On Thursday, U.S. President George W. Bush met the mother of Megumi Yokota, who was abducted by North Korea and said to have married Kim Young-nam, and family members of Kim Han-mi, who escaped the Stalinist country. While the Japanese ambassador to the U.S. joined the meeting, the Korean ambassador did not. The Japanese Foreign Ministry is sponsoring Yokota¡¯s trip to the U.S. The Korean Embassy in the U.S. refused to meet with the North Korean defectors who had come from the South, presumably because the Foreign Ministry told it to.
That is depressing news, and it perforce raises the question once again who this government is working for. The government knew that its own people, who had disappeared 30 years ago, were working to train North Korean spies, yet for nearly 10 years it never once raised the issue with Pyongyang. What¡¯s worse, it didn¡¯t even tell the families, who had agonized about their children¡¯s fate for 30 years.
Now the Korean Embassy in the U.S. is avoiding North Korean refugees who were invited by the U.S. government for an official meeting with the president there. The reasoning? If we provoke the North, it does not help resolve the abductee issue. But everyone knows that it¡¯s the policy of Roh Moo-hyun administration.
By the same token, Japan should have failed to bring any abductees home because it has very noisily brought up the issue in the international community at every opportunity. The truth is, the opposite is happening. While Seoul has heard nothing about the South Koreans abducted by the North in return for its own silence, Japan, by offering normal diplomatic ties and economic assistance, got the North to admit that it kidnapped 13 Japanese people, and Prime Minister Koizumi went to Pyongyang in person to bring back five of them and their families. Seoul kept the fact that the five South Koreans are still alive so quiet that it didn¡¯t even tell their families. Tokyo uncovered the fact that Megumi Yokota¡¯s husband is a South Korean abduction victim by an onerous process that involved shuttling between the two Koreas to collect DNA samples.
After Seoul at last announced to great fanfare that it would raise the abduction issue at the ministerial talks now the cat was out of the bag, all it came back with was a vaguely worded statement that ¡°both sides will make efforts to resolve the issue of people whose whereabouts were not confirmed during and after the war.¡± Does this government have any shame?
|
