Pawns of Pyongyang

The case of two American journalists convicted of illegally entering North Korea and of an additional unspecified “grave crime” shines a light on so many human rights abuses by the Pyongyang government that we hardly know where to begin.

First, there’s the lack of due process afforded Euna Lee, 36, and Laura Ling, 32, who were reporting on human trafficking for San Francisco-based Current TV when they were arrested March 17 along North Korea’s border with China. After three months of detention, they received a closed-door trial with a state-appointed lawyer in the country’s highest court, leaving them no court of appeal. They were then given a draconian sentence of 12 years’ hard labor for a crime that still has no name or public proof.

Surely it was not the regime’s goal to draw international attention to its brutal labor and political “reeducation” camps. But that would be the case if the sentence is carried out. Lee and Ling would enter an inhumane prison system that, according to human rights activists, houses tens of thousands of convicts, many of them political prisoners considered hostile to leader Kim Jong Il’s communist regime. Prisoners typically are put to work in mines or factories for 10 hours a day, seven days a week, with minimal food and sleep, poor hygiene and insufficient medical care. Beatings are commonplace, and many prisoners do not survive.

We don’t know why the government wants to hold Lee and Ling. It may simply be to discourage other journalists from investigating the embarrassing issues of impoverished refugees, human trafficking and official corruption. Yet the timing of the sentencing hints at political motives. The so-called hermit kingdom is beginning a process of political succession following Kim’s recent stroke, and the U.N. Security Council is seeking to punish North Korea with tough sanctions for its May 25 nuclear test. The United States has threatened to interdict North Korean air and sea shipments. Using these women as bargaining chips to extract political concessions would be criminal, but increasingly that seems to be what North Korea intends to do. The U.S. should do everything in its power to keep the issues separate.

Logic would suggest that the Pyongyang government will not subject these journalists to the same abuses North Korean prisoners suffer if they are to be traded one day and might talk about what they saw. But then, logic as we know it does not always prevail in North Korea. We urge the Obama administration to work quickly, ideally with the help of North Korea’s main trading partner, China, for a diplomatic solution to free Lee and Ling.