Sentencing of Laura Ling and Euna Lee Brings Wave of Bad Press for N. Korea
By holding two journalists as hostages (it’s now pretty much beyond denying) and sentencing them to 12 years of “reform through labor,” North Korea has managed to inflame the media in a way that starving 2 million people and putting 200,000 others in concentration camps never quite did. With the attention to Ling and Lee comes a delayed epiphany: maybe North Korea’s regime really is evil:
- Washington Post, Blaine Harden: N. Korean Women Who Flee to China Suffer in Stateless Limbo
- James Rainey, L.A. Times: Truth and danger in North Korea
- N.Y. Times, Jesse McKinley: Two Paths, Same Fate for Reporters Facing Prison
- N.Y. Times, Choe Sang Hun: U.S. Protests N. Korea’s Treatment of Journalists
- San Francisco Chronicle: Jailed journalists attacked stories fearlessly
- L.A. Times, Raja Abdulrahim and Jessica Garrison: Friends speak up for L.A. journalists held by N. Korea
- ABC News: Life Inside North Korea’s Vast Labor Prisons
- Time, Bill Powell: Why North Korea’s Jailing of U.S. Journalists Isn’t Shocking
Better late than never. Today, Kim Jong Il is getting so much bad press I barely have time to link all of it, much less analyze and quote it.
- This online petition by tree-hugging hippies has over 50,000 signatures, though I wonder to whom these signatures will be sent. I signed anyway, and declined the spam “updates” on animal rights and saving the rain forest.
- Photos of a recent vigil.
- A photojournalist who went undercover in North Korea, posing as a Belgian chocolate maker. His must-see web site is here.
- The State Department maintains that Euna Lee and Laura Ling are innocent, although it still isn’t explicitly saying that the two were in China, as it did shortly after they were seized.
It seems that Lee has been reading your blog…
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124484758194711341.html
My interest in the DPRK stems from a visit there myself in 2007 (not as a tourist).
Because Kim Jong Il and his minions will care about what US newspapers say about them. Yes. Of course.
50,000 signatures will surely impress him as well. Definitely.
It’s also funny to observes how all the left-wing newspapers, who usually praise anything that goes into the area of communism and socialism, suddenly scream North Korea is “evil”. For how long will they do it?
I guess it’ll be like with China, Tibet, Myanmar… it will go until either Obama visits another fastfood joint, or until Paris Hilton buys a pink elephant or something like that. Once that happens Ling and Lee will be forgotten. Maybe these newspapers can distract themselves from reality with writing about Michelle O’s shoes again. Or about her makeup or something.
It’s also funny to observes how all the left-wing newspapers, who usually praise anything that goes into the area of communism and socialism, suddenly scream North Korea is “evilâ€. For how long will they do it?
You’ve lost me here. So…left-wing newspapers should logically support Kim Jong Il? What newspapers are you referring to? And isn’t the ‘left’ typically associated — in the ‘west’ at least — with pro-Tibetan advocacy? Conservatives have a word for them, don’t they — ‘hippies’ or something? Speaking of Tibet, it may interest you, Mr Kolb, to know that the Dalai Lama considers himself half-Marxist, half-Buddhist…
Normally I would avoid engagement with posts like this, and I don’t want to go too far off-topic, but this kind of pig-headed simplification of the so-called political spectrum is rampant and unhelpful, and a pet peeve of mine.
Euna Lee is a 2001 graduate of the Academy of Art University. We have compiled an online petition to call for the immediate release of Euna Lee and Laura Ling. Please join us by adding your name: http://www.academyart.edu/petition