Memory of 1983 NK bombing

"City Hunter," a Korean TV drama, uses as a motif the 1983 bombing in Rangoon (now Yangon), an incident in which North Korean agents killed 21 high-ranking South Korean officials in Burma (now Myanmar). Five key figures of the South Korean government sends 21 former agents sent to the North to eliminate 21 North Korean generals as retaliation for the bombing. The agents gather at a meeting point to return to South Korea but 20 of them are killed by gunfire flying from a submarine that was supposed to carry them back to their country. The five key figures killed their agents to eliminate evidence of retaliation. The lone survivor avenges the five amid being betrayed by his nation.

Kang Min Chol, the North Korean agent who carried out the 1983 bombing, went to the meeting point to escape but could not find an escape boat. After being surrounded by Burmese forces, he pulled out a safety pin from a grenade to resist but was arrested. Kang thought his country gave him the grenade to kill him as the grenade automatically exploded though he held the safety button. He felt betrayed and confessed that he was a North Korean agent. This is what former South Korean deputy intelligence chief Ra Jong-yil said in a media interview.

This shows the inhumanity of the North`s communist regime in using humans as a means of carrying out terrorist attacks and then throwing them away. Had Kang been killed as Pyongyang had hoped, proving that the North was behind the bombing would have been difficult. He served 25 years in prison in Myanmar and died of liver disease in 2008. It is regrettable that South Korea failed to bring him to the South and let him testify about the cruelty and inhumanity of North Korean terrorism. Kim Hyun Hee, a North Korean terrorist who bombed Korean Air Flight 858, was brought to South Korea immediately after her arrest. She served as a witness to a North Korean terrorist attack in her trial and was eventually pardoned.

Former deputy intelligence chief Ra said he tried to bring Kang back to the South from 1998 but failed because it could have hampered the sunshine policy of the then Kim Dae-jung administration in Seoul. It seems not upsetting North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to continue its sunshine policy was probably the South`s priority. Of course, having dialogue and making compromise with the North are important but more important is to document the Stalinist country`s every single criminal act and secure evidence, with Germany to serve as a guide.

Editorial Writer Lee Jin-nyong (jinnyong@donga.com)