February 5, 2000	atimes.com

The Koreas PYONGYANG WATCH: Quiet or noisy diplomacy? By Bradley Martin What's the best way to keep North Korea from killing its own people when they try to defect and get caught? There's an ongoing debate on that topic in South Korea between advocates of vocal international pressure and ''quiet diplomacy''. The immediate focus of the debate has been a family of seven North Korean defectors who were captured by Russian border police last November while they were trying to sneak into Russia from China. South Korea's Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry entreated Moscow not to send the seven back, but the Russians turned them over to China on December 30 anyway. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees determined that the seven qualified as refugees. But China ignored that ruling, and pleas by South Korean civic groups as well as the government in Seoul, and sent them back to North Korea on January 12. Their fate after that is not known for certain. But North Koreans who successfully defected to the South fear the worst. Because they declared their intent to defect and were subjected to exposure to the outside world, they ''will be harshly tortured and then openly executed in front of their family members as national traitors'', defector Chang Hae-sung said in a January 16 Yonhap interview. In what the Yonhap story characterized as a ''trembling and indignant voice'', Chang said the authorities might have the defectors' parents beat them to death in an open execution ground, to create a ''mood of horror'' and discourage anyone else with similar ideas. A former North Korean broadcast reporter who defected in 1996, Chang had bitter words for China and Russia for abandoning into ''the depth of death'' people who had left North Korea simply to survive the country's famine conditions. His prescription for future cases: the South Korean government should deal more ''openly'' in the future with the situation of the thousands of North Koreans who make their way to China and survive there in limbo, trying to evade repatriation. Seoul should ask the world to rebuke China for its ''inhumane act'', Chang said. A similar call for getting the issue out into the open came from Lee Soon-ok, another defector quoted in the same article. South Koreans should mount protests and signature drives both at home and abroad to keep the seven from being executed, she urged. ''North Korea is very sensitive to international opinion. The North Korean government might not kill them if the world strongly calls for it,'' said Lee, who for 10 years from 1983 to 1993 was an inmate of a North Korean punishment camp. She has a point about Pyongyang's sensitivity to outside opinion - but the regime's response does not necessarily go much beyond manipulating appearances. According to other defectors Pyongyang Watch has talked with, the regime got tired of hearing outside complaints about its concentration camps a few years ago and closed down some that were near the Chinese border. But the inmates were simply moved to other, more isolated camps, farther from the prying eyes of people in China, said those defectors. Lee had made some related points in a December 3 interview in the Brussels Catholic daily La Libre Belgique. There she said Pyongyang should be attacked along two lines. Besides an international pressure campaign, she urged involving North Korea in a web of normal diplomatic relations. ''Isolating the dictatorship will only strengthen its hold on the people,'' she said. ''If international aid is suspended, the privileged class will retain its privileges but will crack down even harder on the population.'' South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's ''sunshine policy'' takes the right approach, she said. Taking a different view, Korea Times political editor Han Tong-u (January 19) argues that the incident involving the seven unlucky defectors ''could have been avoided if South Korean officials stuck to the erstwhile 'silent' diplomacy in dealing with China and Russia''. Using such means, ''the Seoul government was able last year to bring in a total of 144 North Korean refugees who defected to China and Russia''. Han wonders if the diplomats were too complacent this time. But he asserts that ''blame should also be placed squarely on some members of the South Korean mass media which reported the defection of the North Korean family, ignoring the repeated pleas from the Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry not to do so for fear of the family's safety''. Once the story hit the mass media, Han notes, ''China and Russia turned deaf ears to the South Korean government's pleas to grant the family refugee status.'' Indeed, it was ''naive and presumptuous'' to expect the two countries to do otherwise at that stage, he writes. ''Thus far, China and Russia have maintained an attitude of 'benign neglect' on the North Korean refugee issue as long as it is dealt with in a discreet manner. But if it is made an open, official issue the two countries have little leeway but to follow the rules set by the existing pacts, including the border treaties they have signed with North Korea or each other,'' Han says. ''Most assuredly, making a further fuss out of the refugee issue will only endanger the lives of thousands of North Koreans.'' A third defector quoted in the Yonhap article seems to agree. ''The South has diplomatic relations with China, but they are not longstanding when compared with the ties between Pyongyang and Beijing,'' said Hur Kwang-il. ''China will never side with the South in sensitive issues like North Korean defectors.'' The forces in Seoul that favor quiet diplomacy may be in retreat now that President Kim has sacked his foreign minister over the case involving the seven defectors. A South Korea-based pressure group, the Commission to Help North Korean Refugees, persists in a vocal campaign. The authorities, according to a January 21 Yonhap analysis by Yu Chang-yop, have ''little choice but to follow public disgust over the government's inaction on the issue''. It's hard to tell whether any of this is helping the family of seven. Hur, who defected in 1995, held out little hope for them. ''If the North is sensitive to international opinion it will kill two or three of them. If not, it will kill them all.'' (Special to Asia Times Online)

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