Asia Times: COMMENT: Don't go back, kid!



	March 26, 1999	atimes.com

The Koreas

COMMENT: Don't go back, kid!
By Bradley Martin

BANGKOK - I have one friendly but urgent word of advice for Hong Won-myong.

Hong is, of course, the 20-year-old North Korean whom diplomats and other agents of his country kidnapped, along with his ex-diplomat father and his mother, from a Bangkok apartment a couple of weeks back. The parents escaped in the confusion of an automobile wreck, but young Hong was in another car that wasn't involved in the wreck. His captors held him as a hostage while, with a degree of chutzpah that none but North Koreans could muster, they used him as a bargaining chip as they demanded that the Thai government turn the parents over to them and absolve Pyongyang and its gang of thugs of blame for the kidnap.

Not buying that audacious pitch, the Thais reportedly made clear they were about ready to break off diplomatic relations if the North Koreans refused to give up hostage Hong. That would have hurt in Pyongyang, which finds Bangkok a very useful diplomatic and trading post. And so, on Tuesday, young Hong was released.

Whereupon he did WHAT? Up and held a press conference in which he announced he wanted to go home to North Korea, with or without his parents, that's what. ''I love and respect my father very much,'' he said - adding, with emotion in his voice: ''But if my father refuses to return I will ask to cut parental ties and return home alone."

And there's the cue for my single word of advice to the lad, which is:

DON'T!!!!!!

Oh, I have no doubt that there would be rewards for him. His countrymen would make a big fuss over him on his arrival back in Pyongyang. They would parade him around as an example of the type of selfless patriot that the country's educational system for decades has sought - with pretty astonishing success - to produce.

I can see it now: Thousands of chanting, flower-waving schoolchildren would turn out to line the route of young Hong's motorcade from Pyongyang's airport into the capital, where he would be hustled onto state television (the only television there is in North Korea) to repeat in Korean his performance in Thai at the press conference.

There are various versions of why the parents are unwilling to go home to Pyongyang. North Korea alleges that the father, who was number three in the embassy, embezzled $83 million that the country was to pay for Thai rice imports. No way they would have entrusted him with that much, I think. But it's true that financial irregularities of some degree have become a way of life for North Korean officials, in the environment of extreme uncertainty and rapid moral decline in which their country finds itself, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that a defecting diplomat had dipped into the cookie jar.

What the father told the son, the latter said, was that he wanted to live in a country that would offer the younger Hong more comfort than North Korea.

''But for what should I go to live in a foreign country?'' the son asked rhetorically at the press conference. ''Should I live comfortably like a selfish person, or should I return to join more than 20 million people in my homeland to bring prosperity and development to it?'' And there was more: ''I don't think my country is poor, but it is very rich, because everybody works for the single aim of bringing progress to the country."

Here's another switch: The young man claimed that it was he who, for a time, had not wanted his embassy captors to turn him over to the Thai authorities. He finally agreed when he saw that it would be an opportunity to be with his parents for long enough to persuade them to go home, reunite with his elder brother and other relatives and friends, admit their mistakes and be accepted back into the bosom of the country.

He didn't think his father had been the traitor he was accused of being, young Hong said - but the elder Hong might have made some mistakes. ''I believe that if anyone admits a mistake and asks for forgiveness, my country will give him another chance,'' he said. And he himself would ''work wholeheartedly'' to make up for any mistakes his father might have made.

Obviously, during his two weeks in an undisclosed place of captivity, the kid had some great coaching from the A team that Pyongyang sent in to help him see the light. Even though he had been living outside North Korea for years, he managed to get the party line down pat in his press conference performance. No doubt he would do just as well in public appearances back in Pyongyang.

And then?

And then, after he had served the regime's propaganda machine sufficiently, he would be of no further use. The people who run things wouldn't make him a diplomat, like his dad, and take advantage of his qualifications as a foreign-educated linguist, because they could never banish the suspicion he might some day try to defect and join his parents. That cosmopolitan background of his would count against him, not for him. After all, the North Koreans most inclined to complain about the regime are the cosmopolitan elements, including ethnic Koreans born in Japan or China who immigrated with high patriotic spirit to help ''build the homeland'' but, having in their minds those inevitable points of comparison, found they didn't much like what they found.

So, again, what then? Judging from what I have learned about the North Korean system by talking at length with quite a few of his former countrymen who managed to escape abroad, young Hong after the inevitable waning of his propaganda value most likely would be exiled to one of the poorest, most barren and mountainous parts of his starving country.

If he were lucky, his lot there might be to try to eke out a living, as a farmer or miner, in one of the communities of people who have been cast out of normal communities because their loyalty to ruler Kim Jong-il and his regime is suspect - not on account of any crimes they have committed but due to problems of ''family background.'' Some are the sort of people already mentioned, those whose families had been abroad and who let someone hear them comparing North Korea unfavorably with other countries. In other cases, the exiles' relatives, like young Hong's, have committed such political crimes as defection or attempted defection.

If he were really unlucky, young Hong would be sent to an outright prison camp, accompanying his parents or not depending on whether the regime decided to just get it over with and shoot them (perhaps in an arena, before a crowd screaming for justice - you can forget the quaint notion that high-ranking would-be defectors could simply admit their mistakes and be forgiven), or let them rot and slowly starve in one of the camps that are reserved for political criminals, who have seriously offended the regime, and for the accompanying families of some of those criminals.

For there is no more Confucian country than ''communist'' North Korea, no country I can think of whose system is more dedicated to visiting upon the sons the sins of the fathers. This is the flip side of the system of hereditary succession in which Kim Jong-il is deified because he is the eldest son of the late demigod Kim Il-sung.

Does young Hong know what likely awaits him if he goes back home?

Maybe not. Maybe all he remembers of North Korea, from the time before his family last moved abroad, is life among the elite of Pyongyang. Enough to eat, in those days at least, schools where you grew up learning to worship the Kims, father and son, and to believe more or less wholeheartedly in the sort of sentiments the just-released hostage gave voice to so stirringly at his press conference. It would not be unusual for such a privileged young man to know little of the darkest side of his country - until his turn came to experience it.

More likely, though, he does have some idea - but is really the nice, sincere kid his Bangkok college friends say he is. In which case it should not have been too hard for the team that worked on him for the two weeks of his captivity to use, as leverage, reminders of his remaining relatives and friends in North Korea - and hints of what would happen to them in case he should defect.

That kind of pressure could make it a tough call for anyone, but my advice remains: Don't go back to Pyongyang. Stick with your parents. If the three of you get to the United States or Canada or South Korea, especially if your dad has even a few grand, not to speak of the $83 million he is accused of having ripped off from the regime, you will find that for a price a rescue expedition can be dispatched into North Korea via the China border to bribe authorities and bring out a whole family of internal exiles, even prisoners.

Don't go back, kid.

(Asia Times Online)

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