We've heard nothing more from Robert Park, the evangelical would-be saviour of North Korea who marched across the border at Christmas with the avowed intention of telling the Dear Leader some hard truths, only to be released after a month or so offering the most humiliating of apologies. His return to the US was certainly far from triumphal:
Park, looking thin and pale, would not speak and kept his eyes downcast, AP reported. He burst into tears when he was reunited with his family, his brother said.
Naturally I assumed, as most people would have, that Park's performance was coerced in some way: a condition of his release perhaps. But as to how far that coercion would go - well, I suppose my feeling was that the Korean options were limited by the fact that Park would be returning to the US, from where he'd be free to tell his story. They could hardly treat him as they would a local, or send him home with his fingernails missing.
I think I was being naive, though. South Korea's Chosun Ilbo has this report:
The evangelical activist freed by North Korea after 43 days in detention returned to the U.S. looking thin and pale and burst into tears when he met his parents. Acquaintances say it was a noticeable change from the excitable Robert Park they knew, who walked into North Korea on Christmas Eve on a mission to convert the regime, which he apparently believed came straight from God.
Before he was freed, Park (28) was paraded before the North Korean media, reciting a nonsensical apology that blamed the error of his ways on "false propaganda" in the West and accepted that North Korea "guarantees the freedom" of all its people.
What had happened? A former senior North Korean official who defected to the South said, "Ninety-nine percent of these so-called press conferences in the North are faked through torture and coercion."
The State Security Department is in charge of such cases. Investigators from the psychological warfare office reportedly attempt to penetrate the inner world of detainees or suspects through an alternate series of torture and conciliatory persuasion. The investigators keep the detainees awake until they surrender.
But if Park was scared in the North, it would have been nothing compared to what North Korean dissidents suffer. Still, anybody from the free world would feel a lot more panic if they experience torture, however mild it is considered in the North.
North Koreans are said to shudder in horror at the mere mention of the underground prisons of the State Security Department, because unimaginable brutality is committed there. Once the department finishes investigation, detainees are transferred to another agency codenamed "No. 3 Building."
This sounds all too horribly plausible. Look at the before and after photos. This wasn't a man who'd simply been put under pressure to say the right thing: this was a man who'd been broken. It wouldn't have been much of a challenge for the North Koreans - an impressionable young man with little experience of the world, full of idealism. No fingernail extraction would have been required.
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