Trump: 3 U.S. citizens held in North Korea might be freed
Activist says trio was moved from labor camp, NBC News reports.
Will three U.S. citizens detained by North Korea finally be allowed to leave the country? President Donald Trump seems to think so. On Wednesday night, he tweeted out a message that suggested the Americans could soon go free.
Trump tweeted: “As everybody is aware, the past Administration has long been asking for three hostages to be released from a North Korean Labor camp, but to no avail. Stay tuned!”
(Two of the three prisoners were in fact detained by North Korea after Trump’s inauguration.)
Former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, now a member of President Trump’s legal team, also indicated the possibility of release on Thursday in an interview with Fox News. “We got Kim Jong Un impressed enough to be releasing three prisoners today,” he said.
Neither Trump nor Giuliani offered any details as to why they believe a release may be imminent. South Korean media outlets have recently reported a claim by an activist that the three Americans were moved from a labor camp, according to NBC News, but the State Department has said it “cannot confirm the validity of these reports.”
Here is a look at the three men who might soon go free:
Kim Hak-song
Hak-song was detained by North Korean officials last year. The agricultural consultant is being held on accusations of having planned “hostile acts,” a vague term that has been used to charge individuals with attempts to overthrow the regime in Pyongyang.
Not much is known about Hak-song. He was likely born in China, but he later moved to the United States and became a U.S. citizen. He subsequently returned to the Yanji area in China, which is a hub for North KoreaChina trade.
After studying agriculture there, according to the BBC, he moved to North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang.
Hak-song was associated with the Pyongyang University of Science & Technology, or PUST, a privately run institution that was founded in 2010 and is financed by Christian groups that face severe repression in North Korea.
Kim Dong-chul
Dong-chul is the only one of the three prisoners who was detained before Trump’s inauguration, in October 2015.
The former Virginia resident is now in his mid-60s and was living in the Chinese city of Yanji, near the North Korean border, before he was detained. Dong-chul is believed to have moved to Yanji in 2001 and was working for a hotel services company when he was detained.
North Korea sentenced Dong-chul to 10 years in prison for allegedly spying on and trying to subvert North Korea.
Tony Kim
The 59-year old accountant, who was born in South Korea but was a naturalized U.S. citizen, had been teaching at the Yanbian University of Science and Technology in Yanji for more than 15 years. The university is associated with PUST, its North Korean sister school.
Tony Kim also made multiple trips to North Korea for humanitarian work and teaching assignments, according to The Washington Post’s Anna Fifield, most recently teaching finance and management in Pyongyang for several weeks at a time.
He was detained by North Korean authorities on April 22, 2017, as he was trying to leave the country with his wife, who has since returned to the United States. He was subsequently accused of “acts of hostility” and aiming to overthrow the regime.
The last time his liberal political party was in power, Moon Jae-in saw his boss at the time, Roh Moo-hyun, then South Korea’s president, walk across the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea for a summit meeting that resulted in a peace declaration and promises of massive aid.
He then saw those deals discarded a year later, in 2008, by a newly elected president who sought closer ties with President George W. Bush, who had branded the North part of an “axis of evil.”
Now, as president of South Korea, Moon is keen not to repeat past failures as he stakes his own political career on brokering a deal between the unpredictable leaders of the United States, his nation’s protector, and North Korea, its mortal foe.
As chief of staff during the Roh administration, from 2003 to 2008, Moon did not participate in the negotiations with the North, led at the time by Kim Jong Il, the father of the current leader, or join Roh’s overland visit to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. But he did help Roh organize those talks, held in October 2007.
He has clearly taken to heart what he sees as the lessons of that stillborn peace initiative.
One takeaway was that advancing inter-Korean relations with generous offers of aid is a non-starter so long as the United States remained locked in a standoff with the North over its nuclear weapons program.
Another was that any deal with North Korea must be struck and implemented early in the terms of the South Korean and U.S. presidents. This ensures the agreement does not die with a change of governments and political ideologies in Seoul and Washington, as the 2007 agreement and other past deals did.
“When we look back, the most important thing is speed,” Moon told the current North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, during their meeting last week in the Demilitarized Zone, the fortified border separating the two Koreas.
During that meeting, Moon urged the North Korean to move quickly to make a deal with President Donald Trump during their talks, expected later this month or next month. “We have to learn lessons from the past,” Moon told Kim.
That need for speed is apparent in the fast pace of diplomacy that appears to be leading to a first-ever summit meeting between the leaders of the United States and North Korea, who just a few months ago appeared on the brink of war.
Moon, 65, has played a key role in bringing together Trump and Kim, who now appear likely to meet at Panmunjom, the same “truce village” in the Demilitarized Zone where Moon held his talks with Kim.
Such a meeting would be a triumph for Moon, who has experienced both highs and lows in his country’s relations with North Korea.
Moon was a conscripted member of an elite paratroop unit in 1976, when axe-wielding North Korean troops murdered two U.S. Army officers while they pruned a poplar tree that blocked their view at Panmunjom. In “Operation Paul Bunyan,” Moon’s unit was sent in to finish chopping down the tree while the North Koreans stood back.
Until last week, Moon’s only visit to North Korea was in 2004, when he accompanied his mother on a government-arranged reunion to see her younger sister for the first time since the Korean War.