• by Marina Litvinsky (washington)
• Tuesday, June 09, 2009
• Inter Press Service

The harsh prison sentence given to two U.S. journalists found guilty of grave crimes against the North Korean state is eliciting concern from human rights groups and analysts.

Laura Ling and Euna Lee were investigating the trafficking of North Korean women into China for California-based Current TV, a television production company owned by former U.S. vice president Al Gore. They were arrested by North Korean officials on Mar. 17 near the Tumen River, which separates North Korea and China, for illegal entry and 'hostile acts'.

After a five-day trial, the journalists were sentenced, on Monday, to 12 years imprisonment with hard labour.

'These two foreign journalists were subjected to the failures and shortcomings of the North Korean judicial system: no access to lawyers, no due process, no transparency,' said Roseann Rife, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific deputy director. 'The North Korean judicial and penal systems are more instruments of suppression than of justice.'

Amid an international outcry over the sentences, the White House said Monday that it was 'engaged through all possible channels' in seeking the release of Ling and Lee. President Barack Obama urged Pyongyang to release the journalists 'on humanitarian grounds'.

'The North Korean government seems to be using these two journalists as pawns in its dangerous game of escalating tensions with the international community. This sentence was harsher than many observers expected, and completely out of line with any of the accusations that Pyongyang has leveled against them,' said Rife.

Tensions between the U.S. and North Korea have been particularly high for the past two months, since North Korea launched a long-range missile on Apr. 5. The U.N. Security Council condemned the launch and demanded a halt to further missile tests. In response, North Korea expelled U.N. nuclear inspectors and vowed never to participate in six-country nuclear negotiations.

In May, North Korea launched its second underground nuclear test, followed by a series of missile test launches. These actions have rattled the international community and prompted the U.S. to push a U.N. resolution that would block North Korea from financing its military programme and give the international community the power to interdict suspect North Korean cargo.

At a press conference in France this past Saturday, Obama signaled that the U.S. would take a harsher stance on dealings with North Korea.

'We are going to take a very hard look at how we move forward on these issues, and I don’t think that there should be an assumption that we will simply continue down a path in which North Korea is constantly destabilising the region and we just react in the same ways by, after they’ve done these things for a while, then we reward them,' he said.

U.S. officials fear that North Korea may use a reduction in the journalists’ sentences as a bargaining tool to avoid further sanctions.

'I think it very unlikely that the North Koreans would let them go without some serious extortion,' L. Gordon Flake, a Korea expert and president of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation told the Los Angeles Times. 'But giving in to that extortion would fundamentally undermine broader U.S. national security interests.'

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the U.S.’s differences with North Korea over Pyongyang’s arms programme are 'separate and apart from what’s happening to the two journalists.'

The U.S. is also considering reinstating North Korea to a list of state sponsors of terrorism, Clinton said in an interview broadcast Monday.

'We’re going to look at it,' Clinton said on the television programme 'This Week'. 'There’s a process for it. Obviously we would want to see recent evidence of their support for international terrorism.'

North Korea was placed on the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1988 after its agents were implicated in the bombing of a South Korean airliner that killed 115 people. The Bush administration removed North Korea from the list of terrorist states last year under a deal in which North Korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons programme.

It is believed that the U.S. is considering sending a special envoy to North Korea to negotiate for the journalists’ release. Possible candidates include Al Gore and Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who arranged the release of a U.S. citizen North Korea 15 years ago.

The White House has declined comment on the subject.

'Talk of an envoy is premature, because what first has to happen is a framework for negotiations on a potential humanitarian release,' Richardson told NBC News. 'What we would try to seek would be some kind of a political pardon.'

There have been numerous reports in recent weeks the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who is recovering from a stroke, had chosen his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, as his successor. The North Korean military and China, North Korea’s only ally, are believed to oppose the move that would make Jong-un the third generation to rule.

North Korea’s brutal labour camps, which the State Department says hold an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 political prisoners, have long been elicited cries of abuse. Amnesty International pointed out that prisoners in North Korea were forced to undertake physically demanding work which included mountain logging and stone quarrying, often for 10 hours or more per day, with no rest days.

Guards beat prisoners suspected of lying, not working fast enough, or for forgetting the words to patriotic songs. Forms of punishment included forced exercise, sitting without moving for prolonged periods of time, and humiliating public criticism.

Because of the international attention the journalists’ case has garnered experts believe the two women will be escape the harshest treatment.

'If these women do get sent to the camps, they’re probably going to make sure that they don’t die in detention,' David Hawk, author of the 2004 study 'The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps' told the Los Angeles Times. 'They’re probably going to be treated better.'

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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