A kingdom of abduction

The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a non-governmental organization, issued a report Thursday saying Pyongyang has abducted more than 180,000 foreign nationals from 12 countries since the 1950-53 Korean War. The number includes some 93,000 ethnic Koreans in Japan and 82,000 South Koreans taken to the North during the war. The committee also says an additional 5,000 people were kidnapped by the North.

In June 2005, the North let a South Korean man whom it kidnapped as a high school student show up at a family reunion. Kim Yeong-nam saw his mother for the first time in 28 years after he was abducted by North Korean agents while picnicking at a Yellow Sea island in 1978. His kidnapping was confirmed in the South in 1997, when a North Korean spy caught in the South said he kidnapped a high school student on his way back to the North after completing his mission in the South. The abductee was then nurtured as an agent of the North Korean Workers’ Party for operations in South Korea. When he met his mother at the family reunion, he was a senior official of the Workers` Party. He set a table for his mother’s 80th birthday and gave her wild ginseng roots and silk as birthday presents.

In 1977, Japanese middle-school student Megumi Yokota went missing. She married Kim in 1986. As the news was first known by An Myong-chin, who defected to the South in 1996, Yokota became the symbol of Japanese nationals abducted by the North. As the call of the Japanese people for her repatriation grew stronger, Pyongyang said she died in 1993 and her husband married a North Korean woman afterwards. The North then sent Kim and his wife to the family reunion so that he could reunite with his mother.

The report also includes stories of other abductees including Ko Sang-mun, a South Korean high school teacher who was kidnapped in 1979 in Norway, and Yaeko Takuchi, who taught Japanese to Kim Hyun-hee, the main culprit in the 1987 bombing of a Korean Air passenger jet.

Since South Korea and Japan raised the abduction issue, the number of people kidnapped by the North has decreased. The committee made the report with funding from the National Endowment for Democracy thanks to the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004. South Korea should also accelerate the legislation of its North Korean human rights act to put the brakes on Pyongyang’s abductions.

Editorial Writer Lee Jeong-hoon (hoon@donga.com)