Free Aijalon Gomes

It should go without saying that I am in sympathy with the goals of Robert Park and Aijalon Gomes, and in complete disagreement that they advanced those goals through their quixotic walks into North Korea. Most people today only remember Park for his bizarre confession and his crypic references to the sort of sexual torture that, without knowing more, sounded like something more than a few of us have purchased for our friends at bachelor parties in our boorish youth.

Aijalon Gomes may be made of sterner stuff. After seven months in a North Korean prison — try to imagine how interminable each of those months must have been — we’ve heard no confession, only the troubling report that he tried to take his own life. That still doesn’t mean he’ll make North Korea a less cruel place for having gone there. If he becomes “Kim Jong Bill” Richardson’s justification for another self-serving ransom mission to Pyongyang, he’ll only have helped to advance the Kim Dynasty’s diplomatic, political, and financial goals. Park and Gomes would have done more good and spread their message more effectively by joining in the leaflet balloon campaign. And although Gomes did not publish a manifesto when he crossed, it seems that he took his inspiration from Robert Park, who said he didn’t want anyone in our government to do anything to secure his release. Of course, that’s not a wish that any citizen can reasonably expect his government to honor, but I would certainly oppose giving any concession of any kind for his release.

But what other plausible justification is there for holding Aijalon Gomes in a jail cell for seven months? Nothing Aijalon Gomes did was vaguely violent, surreptitious, or criminal.

I may value my discretion more than Gomes’s valor, but I can’t deny that I envy the courage of this 31-year-old English teacher from Boston. Having just spent the better part of last weekend absorbed in this remarkable archive of historic newspapers from Georgia — including contemporary accounts of slavery by its defenders — I am tempted to think that Aijalon Gomes’s greatest error was an excess of sincerity in taking up the abolitionist cause of his African ancestors so that Asians will not be enslaved today. There is something exceptional about this in our age of individual and ethnic selfishness. If so, this certainly mitigates Mr. Gomes’s fault. Indeed, it honors him.

Enough is enough. Aijalon Gomes has committed no crime but to demand justice from the unjust. The time has long passed for him to be set free. The men who represent Aijalon Gomes in Congress must see his captivity for what it is — a thinly veiled demand for ransom. Scott Brown must inform himself of the plight of his constituent, and John Kerry, who has misbegotten the notion that he represents Kim Jong Il on the Foreign Relations Committee, must remember that he really represents the Gomes family in the Senate. It is time for Aijalon Gomes to come home, something that is most likely to happen soon if we attach legal and financial consequences to his captivity. Specifically, members of Congress ought to remember that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act would allow the Gomes family to file suit against North Korea — imagine that, someone actually suing the responsible party! — for any act that causes it to be listed as a state sponsor of terrorism. If there will be renewed moves to list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism anyway, and I think there will be, then I hope the staffers who write the bills and their findings of fact will think of Aijalon Gomes and his family.