Word: koreanness
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Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the American journalists who were each handed 12 years in prison yesterday by a North Korean court for committing "hostile acts" by allegedly overstepping the border in March, have received a harsh sentence by Western standards of justice. The news is grim, to be sure. But former prisoners in Pyongyang's horrific penal system speculate that the pair may not have to endure the grimmest conditions, which very few have emerged to talk about...
...Some say the same whims that informed their long sentence could work in the favor of Ling and Lee, who were reporting for Al Gore's Current TV when they were detained. North Korean activists like Seoul-based Kim Sang Hun, who has interviewed nearly two dozen former prisoners, says the journalists "won't see the real conditions" in the North's prison system because even Pyongyang knows the situation in the country's penal system is something to be ashamed of - a humiliating condition that the Americans would only bear witness to once they were released. Kim thinks...
...North (Hwan's grandfather and other family members were also arrested by the security police in North Korea for "crimes" never delineated). The American journalists, employed by Current TV, a San Francisco-based TV network founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, were filming a report about North Korean refugees in China when they were seized by North Korean agents along the border between the two countries. The U.S. government immediately expressed its dismay and called on North Korea to release the two women on humanitarian grounds. But it is hardly a foregone conclusion that the North will comply...
...regime has also kidnapped several hundred South Koreans over the years - usually also to help train its spies, but not always. Since late March, the North has detained a South Korean business executive who was working at the Gaesong Industrial District, a site just across the border, where scores of South Korean companies set up light manufacturing operations. The project was arguably the most visible success of the so-called Sunshine Policy run by Roh Moo Hyun, the former South Korean President who committed suicide in May. Pyongyang revoked all the contracts at Gaesong last month and has continued...
...always some twisted policy goal that drives Pyongyang to kidnapping; Kim has also resorted to abduction to satisfy his personal whims. The North Korean dictator has long had a passion for movies, but he evidently believed North Korea's cinema wasn't up to his standards. In the late '70s, when his father Kim Il Sung was running the country, Kim apparently ordered the abduction of Shin Sang-ok, then perhaps the most famous film producer in the South, and his wife, Choi Eun-hee, a famous actress. Shin was imprisoned for four years, then forced to make a socialist...