Draconian S. Korean Law Snares 7 in Group That Visited North

Just last year, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung was in Pyongyang with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, toasting the eventual reunification of their two nations, which were divided by war half a century ago. The leaders hugged as they said their farewells in the North’s capital.

But when a group of South Koreans returned home from a mid-August trip to Pyongyang--a visit authorized by their own government--seven were arrested at the airport here and imprisoned for expressing pro-North sentiments and fraternizing with North Koreans.

Their alleged crime: violating the country’s anti-Communist National Security Law. Their trials begin Monday.

The arrests illustrate the problems and paradoxes of the draconian law, which has long been attacked by domestic and international human rights groups and seems particularly out of sync with the South Korean president’s policy of engagement with the North.

The South Korean Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, conscience, press and assembly. But the National Security Law, enacted in 1948, imposes sentences of up to seven years for those who praise, encourage or sympathize with “anti-state’ groups such as North Korea. Over the years, thousands have been arrested and imprisoned under the law--including Kim Dae Jung, who was a dissident before he was elected president in 1997.

Those recently prosecuted include Song Hak Sam, 56, a Korean American from New York who wrote a book called “Kim Jong Il’s Reunification Strategy,” for which he and his South Korean publisher were accused of spreading North Korean ideology. He received a sentence of 2 1/2 years, suspended for three years.

The most prominent of the seven men arrested at the airport is Kang Jeong Koo, a sociology professor at Dongguk University here who has since been released. He was indicted for writing in a guest book at Mangyondae, the birthplace of North Korea’s late “Great Leader,” Kim Il Sung: “Let’s uphold the Mangyondae spirit to accomplish the great task of national unification.”

The six other men--who, according to their lawyers, did nothing more than fraternize with North Korean counterparts in the Pan-Korean Alliance for Reunification--remain in jail. The lawyers say prosecutors probably will try to prove that the six members of the alliance, which is outlawed in the South, made the trip to hold meetings with the North Korean chapter. In the past, alliance members from the two chapters have met surreptitiously in third countries.

The seven defendants were among about 350 South Korean delegates--including teachers, farmers and members of religious groups--who attended the inter-Korean Liberation Day festivities in Pyongyang on Aug. 15-21, commemorating the Korean peninsula’s freedom from Japanese occupation in 1945. All the delegates had the South Korean government’s approval to make the trip.

Not everyone who wanted to go was allowed to attend. The government denied permission to Lee Jong Lin, 81, chairman of the Pan-Korean Alliance’s Southern chapter, who has been imprisoned eight times for alleged violations of the National Security Law.

Technically, the two Koreas are still at war, with a heavily fortified border between them. Criticism of the North and concern about its intentions have mounted in recent weeks as Kim Jong Il has failed to live up to promises he made at last year’s summit, including rebuilding an inter-Korean railroad and visiting the South. The North’s eleventh-hour cancellation of a round of family reunions scheduled for this month exacerbated the concern of conservatives in the South.

Nevertheless, the law “doesn’t distinguish between private actions that harm national security and those that are expressions of public opinion,” Robert J. Fouser, an associate professor at Kagoshima University in Japan, wrote in late August in an opinion piece for the Korea Herald newspaper. “It is a moralistic law that reflects the totalitarian notion that private thought and actions must reflect ruling ideology.”

Kim Dae Jung has vowed to revise the law, but he has run into resistance from conservatives. The last revision came a decade ago. With the recent disintegration of a coalition government, Kim’s party no longer holds a majority in parliament.

The president’s office says that, at the very least, it is campaigning for a narrower interpretation of the law. Officials note that arrests for violations have decreased from 468 in 1998 to 130 last year. Moreover, more than 7,000 people imprisoned under the act were granted amnesty in 1998, along with other prisoners, for signing a promise to obey the law. A previous requirement, which called on them to renounce their ideology before gaining freedom, was dropped.

The law seems particularly anachronistic now that Kim has ushered in a “sunshine policy” promoting dialogue with the North. The policy led to last year’s summit, in which the two leaders vowed to promote reunification. There have been several subsequent rounds of high-level talks, as well as reunions between a few hundred of the estimated 10 million people in the two nations who have family members on the other side of the border.

Kang spent 51 days in jail before his release Oct. 11 on $10,000 bond. The 57-year-old professor, who teaches political and historical sociology, specializes in contemporary relations between the Koreas. It took him a lifetime to fulfill his dream of visiting the North.

In a recent telephone interview, he blamed the South Korean media for misrepresenting the comments he wrote in the guest book and triggering his arrest. By invoking the “Mangyondae spirit,” he said, he was referring to Kim Il Sung’s group of elite compatriots, who were educated in Eastern Bloc countries and fought against the Japanese.

Although Kang acknowledges that the North invaded the South, starting the Korean War, he maintained that continuing to characterize North Koreans as aggressors only sours relations.

“We should recognize them as people who tried to promote unification and independence from the Japanese rather than as aggressors,” Kang said. “The U.S. had an internal war, the Civil War, but you don’t say Gen. Lee was the aggressor, just as we shouldn’t say North Korea was the aggressor. It was an internal struggle.”