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Category: Foreigners in N. Korea

June 12, 2009

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...
Categories Ling/Lee Incident
June 12, 2009

Behold … the Awesome Moral Authority of John Kerry! (Updated)

Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on North Korea to release the women “promptly and unconditionally.” While he said the release should be a humanitarian gesture not linked to the nuclear showdown, Kerry said that North Korea had an opportunity to reach out. “We hope that common sense is going to prevail and that North Korea will see this not as an opportunity to further dig a hole but as an opportunity to open up and...
Categories Diplomacy/Ling/Lee Incident/U.S. Politics
June 8, 2009

What next for Laura Ling and Euna Lee?

A sentence, as expected, has been handed down, but what happens next for Laura Ling and Euna Lee? According to a report on GMA this morning, it has been speculated that in addition to a visit from a high-ranking U.S. official, North Korea may also want an official U.S. apology to be issued in regard to this case. Apparently, either before I tuned into GMA or after I switched it off, George Stephanopoulos told the program that Hillary Clinton has...
Categories Human Rights/Ling/Lee Incident
June 8, 2009

North Korea Sentences American Journalists to Twelve Years of Hard Labor

[Update: Twelve years is also the maximum sentence. Obviously, the North Koreans are sending a message. The message is, “This one is going to cost you.”] North Korea on Monday sentenced two American journalists to 12 years of hard labor in a case widely seen as a test of how far the isolated Communist state was willing to take its confrontational stance toward the United States. The Central Court, the highest court of North Korea, held the trial of the...
Categories Ling/Lee Incident
June 7, 2009

Is Barack Obama Finding His Inner Churchill?

[Update:   Clinton hints at putting North Korea back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, and calls the charges against Laura Ling and Euna Lee “absolutely without merit or foundation.”  Does that mean Clinton’s best information is that they were inside China?] I continue to be gleefully amazed by the toughness and seriousness of Obama’s words on North Korea.  Now let’s see if they translate into effective action.  In his young presidency, Obama has already jettisoned some of...
Categories "United" Nations/Ling/Lee Incident/Sanctions/Washington Views
June 6, 2009

Still No Word on the Fate of Euna Lee and Laura Ling

You have to wonder why a court would take three days to announce its judgment on a charge as simple as illegal border crossing.  Seriously, this isn’t international money laundering or a complex stock manipulation scheme.  Did they cross the border or didn’t they?  The issue becomes even simpler when the results are pre-ordained the the judicial procedure is, shall we say, streamlined: […] Venezuelan poet Ali Lameda described to the human rights group Amnesty International in a written report...
Categories Ling/Lee Incident