North Korea's Price for Concessions on Nukes and Kidnapped Journalists May Be Exorbitant

Now comes the hard part for American policy-makers: balancing a tough line on North Korea's nuclear and missile tests with mounting public demands in the United States to win the release of two American television journalists convicted of "grave crimes" and sentenced to 12 years of "hard labor".

No one in Washington seems to have any idea what to do. The statements that have been issued have not had the slightest impact on North Korean strategists. Instead, Pyongyang's attitude has underscored its success in using the two journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee of Al Gore's Current TV network, as tools in a much larger game.

"It doesn't look like the [Barack] Obama administration cancontribute much to the equation," said Nicholas Eberstadt, scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. There has been talk of sending former US vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore to Pyongyang to help spring them, but it's another matter whether or not North Korea will receive him. Another candidate for such a mission is New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who won the release after three months of an American who had swum the Yalu River in 1996. Richardson also helped to negotiate the release 13 days after an army helicopter pilot was shot down after straying across the line between North and South Korea.

Gore and his San Francisco-based Current TV have maintained silence on the cases, while Richardson was on morning television expressing a willingness to help. Richardson called the news of the sentencing "a good sign", observing that "in previous instances where I was involved in negotiating, you could not get this started until the legal process had ended".

Richardson, a strong advocate of reconciliation with North Korea, neglected to mention that both those cases were far simpler than that of Ling and Lee and that neither went to trial.

The Yalu River swimmer was clearly a nut, and the US army helicopter had obviously gone off course in an episode in which the co-pilot was killed. Ling and Lee, by contrast, were filming along the Tumen River border to obtain a story that would only be extremely negative in its portrayal of North Korean human-rights abuses perpetrated on defectors who cross the border to escape starvation and imprisonment.

Ling's older sister, Lisa, moreover, had earlier done a documentary for National Geographic television in which she used a hidden camera while posing as a member of the team of a Nepalese eye doctor admitted into North Korea to cure cataracts. The film ended with North Koreans removing their blindfolds, seeing portraits of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and his late father, Kim Il-sung, and thanking both of them profusely for giving them back their eyesight.

Against this background, if North Korea is receptive to anything, the price may be prohibitively high in terms of concessions that the US administration is prepared to make.

"North Korea certainly hopes to use these hostages as pawns," said Eberstadt. "Given the past record of dealing, the North Koreans have reason to think they can do so."

The North Koreans "will have conditions and demands", observed Larry Niksch, long-time research analyst at the Congressional Research Service. For starters, Niksch noted, "They will want an apology" for the "grave crimes" committed by the two women when North Korea claims they entered the country illegally by crossing the frozen Tumen River from China on March 17.

An apology might be easy enough, no matter whether Ling and Lee actually crossed the border, were standing on the ice or were seized by North Korean soldiers while on the Chinese side. But beyond the apology, it's a cinch the North Koreas "will want concessions on the nuclear issue", said Niksch. The US is preparing to press the United Nations Security Council for stringent sanctions as punishment for the nuclear test of May 25.