[ad_1]
North Korea has held about 20 Americans since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, including the American soldier who on Tuesday walked across the border into the truce village set up to help forge the armistice. There was no easy way for Washington to win them back.
The two countries do not have direct diplomatic relations and have been foes for decades. Pyongyang often uses detained Americans – the last case was about five years ago – as political pawns and seeks maximum concessions for their release.
Who is the American soldier detained in North Korea?
The Army has identified him as Private Second Class Travis King, 23, a cavalry scout from Wisconsin who has been in the Army since January 2021. He was jailed for nearly two months in South Korea for assault and was scheduled to fly to Texas where he faced expulsion from the Army. Instead, he left the airport and joined a tour of the joint security area in the truce village of Panmunjom. This is the only place on the peninsula where military personnel from the United States and North Korea can stand face to face on their side of the border – a concrete slab almost as high as a cigarette lighter.
A person on the tour said the man laughed out loud and ran between some of the buildings on the border. King’s mother, Claudine Gates, told ABC News that she spoke with her son a few days ago when he told her he was going back to Fort Bliss in Texas, saying she could not imagine her son would cross into North Korea.
Has this ever happened before?
This type of crossing is rare. Many of the other Americans held in North Korea were either already in the country as part of a tour to do some kind of work assignment. Almost all of the unauthorized crossings began in China, which shares a long border with North Korea and is much less heavily guarded than the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, where hundreds of thousands of troops are stationed on either side of the barbed wire barrier. The most similar incident occurred nearly 60 years ago when Army Sergeant Charles Jenkins said he drank about 10 beers and fled his post in 1965 to go to North Korea so he wouldn’t have to serve in the Vietnam War. He was in North Korea for 40 years, and soon after crossing it, he realized he made a huge mistake, according to his 2017 obituary in the New York Times.
Who else has been arrested from the United States?
They included devout Christians who went there for what they saw as humanitarian reasons, college students on tours, a pair of reporters on a story, and some people whose relatives described them as troubled individuals. North Korea detained US citizen Bruce Byron Lawrence for about a month in 2018, accusing him of illegal entry from China.
On the other hand, thousands of Americans have gone to North Korea without incident on trips where they are closely watched by escorts and limited to the places they can visit. The country is now off-limits to Americans unless permission is granted at a high level, with the State Department asking citizens not to go there “because of the continued risk of arrest and long-term detention of United States citizens.”
What happens to the reservation?
Americans were held in places ranging from rickety shacks to hotel rooms. They are usually interrogated for hours and driven to mental breakdown points. Kenneth Bay, an American missionary, was arrested in November 2012 in the northeastern city of Rason and sentenced to 15 years in a labor camp for what the North Koreans described as plans to overthrow the regime. He was forced to break rocks and dig for coal. His nearly two-year detention was the longest for an American. Geoffrey Fowle, a tourist who was held for about six months for leaving a Bible at a sailors’ club in 2014, has been held in guest houses. North Korean authorities arrested Otto Warmbier, a 21-year-old University of Virginia student on a group tour in January 2016, and charged him with attempting to steal a propaganda poster. He was initially sentenced to 15 years hard labor, but was sent back to the United States in June 2017 in a comatose state – brain dead, blind and deaf. He died days later.
How are they released?
North Korea often holds show trials for foreigners it detains and sentences them to several years in prison with hard labour. But most of the Americans it detained had been in detention for a year or less. The state has sought high-level envoys from the United States including former President Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to get the captives out of the country, and usually allows a release that will score points at home for its leader.
What happens now to the king?
The current arrest comes after all Western diplomats have left the country due to the pandemic, leaving the United States with few partners on the ground. Sweden’s embassy in Pyongyang has acted on behalf of US interests before, but now appears to be unstaffed. The United States has at times used a back channel through North Korea’s mission to the United Nations, but this year Pyongyang has rejected offers from the Biden administration to speak, making King’s status more problematic than previous arrests.
The two countries do not have direct diplomatic relations and have been foes for decades. Pyongyang often uses detained Americans – the last case was about five years ago – as political pawns and seeks maximum concessions for their release.
Who is the American soldier detained in North Korea?
The Army has identified him as Private Second Class Travis King, 23, a cavalry scout from Wisconsin who has been in the Army since January 2021. He was jailed for nearly two months in South Korea for assault and was scheduled to fly to Texas where he faced expulsion from the Army. Instead, he left the airport and joined a tour of the joint security area in the truce village of Panmunjom. This is the only place on the peninsula where military personnel from the United States and North Korea can stand face to face on their side of the border – a concrete slab almost as high as a cigarette lighter.
A person on the tour said the man laughed out loud and ran between some of the buildings on the border. King’s mother, Claudine Gates, told ABC News that she spoke with her son a few days ago when he told her he was going back to Fort Bliss in Texas, saying she could not imagine her son would cross into North Korea.
Has this ever happened before?
This type of crossing is rare. Many of the other Americans held in North Korea were either already in the country as part of a tour to do some kind of work assignment. Almost all of the unauthorized crossings began in China, which shares a long border with North Korea and is much less heavily guarded than the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, where hundreds of thousands of troops are stationed on either side of the barbed wire barrier. The most similar incident occurred nearly 60 years ago when Army Sergeant Charles Jenkins said he drank about 10 beers and fled his post in 1965 to go to North Korea so he wouldn’t have to serve in the Vietnam War. He was in North Korea for 40 years, and soon after crossing it, he realized he made a huge mistake, according to his 2017 obituary in the New York Times.
Who else has been arrested from the United States?
They included devout Christians who went there for what they saw as humanitarian reasons, college students on tours, a pair of reporters on a story, and some people whose relatives described them as troubled individuals. North Korea detained US citizen Bruce Byron Lawrence for about a month in 2018, accusing him of illegal entry from China.
On the other hand, thousands of Americans have gone to North Korea without incident on trips where they are closely watched by escorts and limited to the places they can visit. The country is now off-limits to Americans unless permission is granted at a high level, with the State Department asking citizens not to go there “because of the continued risk of arrest and long-term detention of United States citizens.”
What happens to the reservation?
Americans were held in places ranging from rickety shacks to hotel rooms. They are usually interrogated for hours and driven to mental breakdown points. Kenneth Bay, an American missionary, was arrested in November 2012 in the northeastern city of Rason and sentenced to 15 years in a labor camp for what the North Koreans described as plans to overthrow the regime. He was forced to break rocks and dig for coal. His nearly two-year detention was the longest for an American. Geoffrey Fowle, a tourist who was held for about six months for leaving a Bible at a sailors’ club in 2014, has been held in guest houses. North Korean authorities arrested Otto Warmbier, a 21-year-old University of Virginia student on a group tour in January 2016, and charged him with attempting to steal a propaganda poster. He was initially sentenced to 15 years hard labor, but was sent back to the United States in June 2017 in a comatose state – brain dead, blind and deaf. He died days later.
How are they released?
North Korea often holds show trials for foreigners it detains and sentences them to several years in prison with hard labour. But most of the Americans it detained had been in detention for a year or less. The state has sought high-level envoys from the United States including former President Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to get the captives out of the country, and usually allows a release that will score points at home for its leader.
What happens now to the king?
The current arrest comes after all Western diplomats have left the country due to the pandemic, leaving the United States with few partners on the ground. Sweden’s embassy in Pyongyang has acted on behalf of US interests before, but now appears to be unstaffed. The United States has at times used a back channel through North Korea’s mission to the United Nations, but this year Pyongyang has rejected offers from the Biden administration to speak, making King’s status more problematic than previous arrests.
[ad_2]
