Prisoners Won’t Shed Convictions

“To My Dear Mother, who must be hanging her head down low not finding my name on the list on the prison wall, who must be lonelier now than at any time before . . . not being able to touch my hand.”

Cho Soon Sun, 73, choked on her son’s words as she recited them to the small crowd gathered in the park. The letter from Kang Yong Ju tried to explain why he had chosen to remain in his prison cell rather than answer the government’s simple questions about how he would obey the law if freed.

His stand on principle came at a steep price: seven more years in prison, where he’d been sent 13 years ago for handing a videotape to students who the government says were spies. Had Kang answered satisfactorily, he would have joined the 2,174 South Koreans--imprisoned for everything from treason to petty crimes--who walked free in the new government’s sweeping amnesty program last month.

“I would be able to go out to meet you and end your agony, but I couldn’t do it,” Kang wrote. “I couldn’t accept that I have to show my inner thoughts to the authorities and be judged. If I refuse to sign, I’ll be freer in the court of conscience.”

As Cho finished reading the letter, the elderly woman raised her fist. “Free all prisoners of conscience!” she shouted. Two dozen women joined the chorus: “Free all prisoners of conscience!”

The prisoners--most serving sentences for security violations such as affiliating with Communists or North Korean groups--and their die-hard families represent one of the most difficult political dilemmas facing South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, a former dissident and prisoner himself.

Kim has vowed many times to put human rights on par with economic development in South Korea for the first time. In a bid to appease right-wing opponents while liberating prisoners charged with violations of the National Security Law, Kim’s administration devised a questionnaire that asked three simple questions: What are you in prison for? How will you support yourself? How will you obey the law and the constitution if freed?

Although the questions might not appear to be onerous, to these die-hard prisoners they violate their civil liberties and are a sign that South Korea has a long way to go in becoming a full-fledged democracy.

“If our nation releases the prisoners of conscience without condition, that’s the turning point of a country mature enough to tolerate other thoughts, other viewpoints, other values and opinions,” Kang said in a prison interview. “I want our society to permit variety.”

The amnesty has apparently backfired because so many prisoners balked at answering the questionnaire. Kim has been under fire from both the left and the right for his handling of the issue. Now, Amnesty International has joined the attack.

The group’s secretary-general, Pierre Sane, said after meeting with Kim, “His government’s failure to stop abuse of the National Security Law, to release political prisoners and engage in meaningful dialogue with local human rights organizations, is fast eroding confidence and trust in this reform program.”

International legal experts say the questionnaire is highly unusual in a democratic society, where such questions are asked only as a condition of being naturalized or taking public office.

“It’s not surprising in light of what other nations have done, including Korea, but it’s a little shocking to hear they are still doing that under Kim,” said James Feinerman, chairman of Asian legal studies at Georgetown University Law Center. “You punish someone when, and if, they violate the law, but you don’t make it a condition of their release that you promise not to violate the law.”

Although the prisoners of conscience were asked to submit statements to gain their release, thousands of other prisoners nationwide, who were convicted of various social and petty crimes, were released unconditionally.

A Bittersweet Rally for 242nd Thursday

On the same day Amnesty’s leader met with Kim, the prisoners’ family members rallied outside the historic Tapgol Park in central Seoul for the 242nd Thursday in a row--nearly five years--their purple kerchiefs embroidered in gold with the names of the imprisoned relatives. The rally was particularly bittersweet, coming on the heels of the government’s amnesty initiative. For some, the program answered years of prayers: About 90 of the estimated 450 “prisoners of conscience” had won their freedom in return for answering the controversial questions.

Lee Myong Ja, the mother of a freed prisoner, was on hand to cheer on her comrades, as was her son, Kim Tae Wan. Imprisoned for more than a year for being an officer in Hanchongryon, a student group with ties to North Korean students, Kim Tae Wan had answered the questions thusly: “I have always been a law-abiding student: I kept the law, I am keeping the law, I will always keep the law.”

Poet Park No He, who served eight years of a life sentence for organizing a Socialist workers league, signed too, because he didn’t want to detract from the greater good of Kim’s reform efforts.

While being an ultra-leftist was once necessary to promote change, he said, dissidents must evolve along with the changing government.

But for the relatives of the 360 prisoners who remain in jail, the pain has only worsened. Their hopes for an unconditional pardon by their hero president have been dashed. Others are bitterly disappointed that their relatives--who have already sacrificed their youth and health--would not yield on their ideals.

“Not only me, but all my friends says he’s crazy not to sign: He should sign and get out,” said Cho Jom Soon, whose brother has been behind bars for 21 years. His sentence--on what his sister says are groundless charges of espionage--has ripped their family apart. His wife divorced him shortly after his life sentence, moving out of the country with their 14-day-old baby.

Times have changed drastically since her brother’s sentencing. North Korea still poses a clear military threat, as evidenced by a recent scare over what was mistakenly believed to be a missile launch and also by an earlier submarine incursion, but the ideological power of the North has been dissipated by its failure to feed its own population. Meanwhile, democracy in South Korea has been evolving for the past decade, supplanting brutal dictatorships, and former presidents have been jailed for their role in the 1980 Kwangju massacre, South Korea’s equivalent of Tiananmen Square.

President Kim, who spent six years in prison and 10 years under house arrest for opposing former military regimes, has vowed to maintain a policy of detente with North Korea and been implementing sweeping democratic, economic and human rights reforms since his election in December.

Even so, the questionnaire shows just how fragile this fledgling democracy is. Kim must tread carefully with his right-wing opponents, who have long branded him a Communist sympathizer.

“Kim Dae Jung has long struggled for human rights, but he also must deal with political reality,” said You Jong Keun, a provincial governor and an economic advisor to the president.

The new government thought that it was designing the questionnaire as a means to liberate the prisoners without invading their freedom of thought, officials say. The questionnaire didn’t ask about ideology. And contrary to news reports, no oath was demanded, as in past regimes, when a “conversion” system demanded that prisoners renounce Communist ideology.

“How can you free somebody who doesn’t promise he will keep the law?” Park Joo Son, Kim Dae Jung’s chief legal advisor, asked in his corner office in the Blue House where top government officials work.

Justice Ministry chief prosecutor Moon Sung Woo said: “South Korea and North Korea embrace completely different ideologies. If a member of society cooperates with North Korea and not South Korea, how can we not prosecute him?”

Search for New Concept of Treason

South Korea needs a new concept of what constitutes treason, argued Kim Hye Jung, 33, who was at the rally to support her imprisoned husband, Min Kyong Woo. International officials split Korea into two at the 38th parallel after World War II. Many families also were split--and haven’t seen each other since.

Under President Kim’s “sunshine policy,” private contact between South and North Koreans, once forbidden, is permitted, and companies are encouraged to do business over the border too. Still, to “praise or encourage” North Korea is considered a security breach.

Kim Hye Jung’s husband, an officer in the South Korean branch of the Pan Korean People’s Alliance, a Pyongyang-based Korean unification group with branches in Berlin and Tokyo, is serving a 3 1/2-year sentence for breaching the National Security Law after exchanging faxes with North Korean student counterparts via Tokyo, Kim said. “We consider North Koreans our brethren, our fellow citizens. We are not for the North and not for the South,” she said. “We are for Korea. It’s not treason--it’s patriotism.”

Although she can rarely make the 250-mile trip to see her husband in Pusan, she wholeheartedly supports his stance. “It’s plain to him, his interrogators and the police that he’s not a spy but was made a spy under this absurd law,” she said.

“In the long run, he’ll be regarded as a righteous man.”

While she spoke with a reporter at a modest restaurant where the women gathered after the rally, her 5-year-old son slurped noodle soup. “Where’s your daddy?” he is asked.

“In Pusan.”

What’s he doing?

“Studying.”

“Do you miss him?” He nodded.

Some of the prisoners, such as Cho Sang Rok, the man who hasn’t seen his child for two decades, have all but abandoned hope.

But his sister is persistent. At the rally, she tugged at the sleeve of a reporter, begging her to listen to her brother’s story and visit him in the prison in Andong, about 125 miles southeast of Seoul. In a guest lecture he gave while pursuing a doctorate in Tokyo in 1976, Cho Sang Rok criticized a South Korean military attempt to change the constitution, his sister said. When he returned to South Korea, he was sentenced to life for spying.

Now 52, he spends his days in a solitary cell in a sprawling white prison ringed by mountains and an 8-foot-high steel fence topped with four cords of rusted barbed wire. Bone-thin in his dark blue uniform, Prisoner No. 1310 greeted his sister, a reporter and an interpreter in the visitor’s room.

Asked about the daughter he hasn’t seen since she was 2 weeks old, a darkness crossed Cho’s face and his eyes welled with tears. “I don’t want to talk about that because it’s too painful,” he said. His wife’s family forced her to divorce him after his sentencing, his sister said, and she left with the baby for the U.S.

Suddenly, a guard burst into the room, saying that no foreign visitors are permitted. Asked to show where such a rule is listed, the guard replied, “It’s secret.” An argument ensued. “I know Mr. Cho. I sympathize with his position, but I’ll get fired,” the guard said.

Cho stood, pressed his hand against the glass window to say goodbye and smiled wanly.

The Korean translator was allowed to remain to talk with Kang Yong Ju, whose mother had come to visit.

Kang had been a quiet honor student until high school, when he joined the protests in Kwangju. Many of his comrades were killed, which influenced his convictions.

‘Is This the Only Choice for You?’

To Kang, now 36, the government’s questionnaire smacks of former regimes’ “conversion statements,” in which prisoners were asked to renounce communism to gain freedom.

Once before, in 1986, his mother had urged him to sign such a statement that would reduce his sentence to three years and allow him to be transferred to a prison closer to home. “He said, ‘Don’t come anymore if you’re going to say that,’ ” she recalled. This time, all she asked her son was, “Is this the only choice for you?”

She tries to see her son every month, traveling eight hours on three buses to see him for the maximum 30 minutes daily that prisoners’ families can visit.

And what of her son’s refusal to simply say he’d obey the law? “My son didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, adding, “I’m very proud of him.”

Although she knew her son had refused to answer the written questions, she nevertheless went to the prison on the Aug. 15 “amnesty day” hoping for a miracle. Shortly after 10 a.m., the posting with 40 names appeared.

Only one of the five prisoners of conscience at Andong was listed. It was not her son. When she visited that day, it was the first time he cried in front of her, not being able to touch her hand through the glass.

These days, her son’s letter is her main source of comfort.

“Mother, I may be a fool and impractical, but could it be a small consolation to you that my life sentence was reduced to 20 years [in 1993] without signing the document? I will remain healthy until Sept. 22, 2006, when my term ends, but my heart is aching to think that you are 73 now.

Please mother, live long, live long.

Your son, Yong Ju.”

Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.