March 22, 2001	atimes.com

The Koreas PYONGYANG WATCH They shoot people, don't they? By Aidan Foster-Carter Depending how you look at it, Yu Tae-jun was either very brave or mighty foolish. Either way, by all accounts he's now very dead - at just 33. Growing up in North Korea, Yu lived quite comfortably in the eastern port city of Hamhung, where he sold coal. But what he wanted to be was a writer. Even in North Korea he managed to read Tolstoy and Turgenev. They, and listening to foreign broadcasts, told him of a wider world, far beyond the spiritually stunted realm of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Yu Tae-jun decided to leave. He asked his wife to come, but she refused. So one November day in 1998, Yu took their 3-year-old son and told his wife they were visiting relatives. Next month father and child turned up on a Chinese ship in the South Korean port of Pusan. They settled in Taegu. A year or so later, Yu's mother Ahn Jong-suk joined them. She had been a reporter on a Hamhung paper, then a manager at Pyongyang's foreign language publishing house. Since coming south, she wrote a good deal about human rights (lack of) in North Korea - under a pseudonym, just in case. But now Ahn has gone public, since her human rights concerns came home with a vengeance. Leaving his wife behind must have preyed on Yu Tae-jun's mind. Last June, he left his son with a neighbor - and went back for her. They met up in China, but were either caught there or for some reason entered North Korea. Early this year, according to intelligence reports, Yun was executed in Hamhung in front of a large crowd, summoned to witness what happens to traitors. His wife's fate seems to be unknown. Ahn Jong-suk, left to raise her grandson, is not just grieving but angry - and not only at North Korea. Her adoptive land has behaved very oddly in all this. In October, Taegu police brought her grandson, saying he would otherwise be sent to an orphanage. The authorities repossessed Yu's apartment, part of the perks given to defectors to help them settle. Yet even as the months passed and something was clearly very wrong, Ahn was told to keep quiet and not contact the media. Much good that did her. How different if it had been the other way round, she told the Chosun Ilbo. "When Northerners are executed by firing squad in the South, they're honored as heroes. But here, when a Southerner is [shot] in the North, they do nothing but force one's silence." Indeed. When South Korea, to its great credit, allowed 62 tough old unconverted communist spies and agents, many scarred after decades of solitary confinement and torture, to go North last September, they received a welcome fit for heroes. But as in so much of the new inter-Korean peace process, where's the reciprocity? Having been given in to, Pyongyang promptly demanded more: namely the return of a few others who had earlier recanted but now had second thoughts. Meanwhile the North refuses even to discuss the vastly bigger beam in its own eye: namely the hundreds or thousands of South Koreans held in the North, many for decades. Thankfully, there is still one arm of the South Korean government that does not believe in silence on these matters. The Korean Institute for National Unification (KINU), the major official think tank and research outfit on all matters Northern, publishes an annual North Korean human rights White Paper. The latest edition, just out, lists 487 South Koreans abducted and detained by North Korea in the years since 1953. Most (436) are fishermen - another 3,000-plus have been seized and later released - but they also include 12 airline passengers and crew, 20 naval crewmen, two military police, and 17 others. That's only since 1953. Before that, three years of civil war took a far larger toll in abductions - Seoul changed hands four times - not to mention the 4 million dead. North Korea kidnapped 85,000 Southern professionals during its brief occupation, according to an association of their relatives formed last year. It also kept back thousands of POWs who should have been returned under the 1953 Armistice - a very few of whom are now trickling home via China, but with scant help from the country they fought for. Why is South Korea so ashamed to stand up for its own people and principles? One can see the general logic of starting with the easier issues for North Korea first and leaving the tougher stuff for later. But that is no argument for such flagrant asymmetry. I don't believe Kim Dae-jung gains either ground or respect with Kim Jong-il by thus suppressing his own core values. And it certainly doesn't do him any favors at home, where next year his party stands for election on his record. In democratic South Korea, the state may keep quiet - but not the citizens. Concern over human rights in the North is building fast. Those war abductees' families, after suffering in silence for half a century, are now petitioning the Red Cross, the UN Human Rights committee - even North Korea. It can work. Pyongyang's latest human rights report to the UN is defensive in parts, claiming that the number of capital offenses has been cut. Yet it won't even supply a copy of its latest criminal code! Even in North Korea, you might think, people like the unfortunate Yu Tae-jun should have at least one right: to know what it is you're being shot for. ((c)2001 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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