U.S. weighs options to freeSFlb journalists in North Korea

Christian science monitor

The sentence of 12 years of hard labor for two American journalists in North Korea opens a new chapter in efforts at winning their release.

Analysts in Washington and Seoul agree on that much, after Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency said Laura Ling and Euna Lee would undergo “reform through labor” for having entered North Korea illegally while reporting for San Francisco-based Current TV along the Tumen River border with China.

The real question, though, is whether the North would be willing to talk further about their fates in a period of worsening confrontation between North Korea and the United States and between North and South Korea.

The two were seized by North Korean soldiers March 17 and have been held in what’s described by the Swedish ambassador to North Korea, representing U.S. interests there, as a “state guest house” near Pyongyang. But their whereabouts since their trial Thursday is not known.

There is no clue as to where or how they will serve their sentence. Nor has there been any word as to where they were when seized — though it’s widely believed they had ventured onto the ice in the frozen river while filming a story on North Korean human-rights abuses.

“Undoubtedly, the North Koreans view them as a trump card,” said Scott Snyder, a Korea expert at the Asia Foundation in Washington, but he warns that any dialogue for their release will be “particularly difficult since the U.S. has been moving toward a tougher approach.”

The sentencing coincides with an intensified U.S. effort to obtain approval by the United Nations Security Council of tough sanctions against North Korea in retaliation for the North’s underground nuclear test May 25. The U.S. has produced a draft resolution that is considerably stronger than the resolution adopted by the Security Council after the North’s first nuclear test Oct. 9, 2006.

The draft calls for inspection of cargo vessels suspected of carrying material and components for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as well as the missiles for firing weapons of mass destruction to distant targets. Another provision of the draft calls for cracking down on financial institutions or companies involved in exporting the equipment that North Korea needs for its nuclear and other weapons programs.

The draft would in effect give approval by the U.N. Security Council of the provisions of the Proliferation Security Initiative, an effort engineered during the George W. Bush administration for cooperation among dozens of nations in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

The sentencing of Ling and Lee is expected to complicate U.S. efforts at bringing North Korea to terms. It may not, however, have an immediately noticeable impact.

“My guess is there’s going to be a real resistance to conflating this issue with the missile and nuclear issue,” said Gordon Flake, executive director of the Washington-based Mansfield Foundation, which sets up programs and exchanges with countries. “The most likely scenario would be to try to hold a separate dialogue with the North Koreans.”

One possibility, widely mentioned in recent days, would be for Al Gore, the former vice president and the chairman of Current TV, to go to North Korea in hopes of bringing the women home — or at least negotiating.

The White House said Monday that it’s working through “all available channels” to bring about the journalists’ release. U.S. diplomats may approach the North Koreans at North Korea’s mission to the United States, and the Americans are expected to go through contacts in Beijing who do business with North Korea.