By Donald Kirk

WASHINGTON – Despite being a self-declared atheist, German human-rights activist Dr Norbert Vollertsen applauds the daring of a Korean-American missionary who on Christmas eve walked into North Korea bearing a message of peace and goodwill for Dear Leader Kim Jong-il.

“I have to pay my respect to the Christian radicalism of Robert Park,” said Vollertsen, who was kicked out of North Korea a decade ago for attempting to expose cruelty he had witnessed when working as a doctor with a non-governmental organization.

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// ]]>// <![CDATA[// Vollertsen, now back home in Germany after years spent crusading against North Korean human-rights abuses from South Korea, said he had attempted to return to the North several times. Once he was “ironically” arrested by United States soldiers in Panmunjom, the truce village north of Seoul that straddles the line between the two Koreas.

It’s not known what has happened to the 29-year-old Park, who entered the North by crossing the frozen Tumen River from China. But one thing is certain: the North Koreans will not have taken kindly to a lengthy letter he had in his pocket calling for Kim Jong-il to open his heart to “God’s love” as well as to open borders and concentrations camps. In the North, practicing Christianity is a capital offense.

Park, in charge of a coalition that’s spreading the word of North Korean human-rights abuses, may spend a long, cold winter as a hostage in North Korea. However, he could be spared should the North live up to a New Year’s message of peace and reconciliation.

The message, as promulgated in all North Korean media, calls for establishing “a lasting peace system on the Korean Peninsula” in order to “make it nuclear-free through dialogue”. North Korea, it seems, wants an “end to the hostile relationship” with the US while also improving “the people’s standard of living”.

The emphasis on the economy, shouted out by a crowd at a mass rally in Pyongyang, may be North Korea’s way of acknowledging the problems that accompanied the redenomination last month of the country’s near-worthless currency. This has been viewed as an attempt by North Korea’s rulers to undercut a rising but small middle class that had become accustomed to hoarding won in hopes of converting it to Chinese or Western currency.

In the weeks since the redenomination, North Korean soldiers have been ordered to shoot refugees attempting to escape while those engaged caught illegally attempting to change old for new won have been executed. At the same time, the value of the new won has been plummeting against China’s currency.

“After the money issue, the people are desperate,” Vollertsen told Asia Times Online. “Some of my contacts told me about open rebellion against the government in some northern provinces. When the soldiers are asked to shoot all refugees, that clearly is an indication that something is going wrong for Kim Jong-il.”

Under the circumstances, North Korea has to look to China to resume its role as host of the six-party talks, last held in Beijing in December 2008. That’s not to suggest, however, that North Korea is going to consider doing away with its nukes before attaining a number of other goals, ranging from diplomatic relations with the US to obtaining the massive quantities of aid needed to jump-start its dilapidated economy.

Nor does North Korea want to consider a role for South Korea, which the North prefers to subordinate in talks on the nuclear issue. “They still show pressure toward South Korea,” said Kim Tae-woo at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis, citing forays by North Korean vessels in the West or Yellow Sea as an example of the North’s “two-track strategy”.

North Korea is unlikely to turn around and welcome South Korean President Lee Myung-bak’s proposal for a “grand bargain” under which Pyongyang would receive vast quantities of aid in return for abandoning its nuclear program. Lee on Monday, in his own New Year’s message, called for “a new chapter” in the North-South standoff, but the North’s strategy has been to bypass the South on anything to do with military security.

North Korea’s New Year message, however, may be good news for Robert Park. He may now become a diplomatic pawn as the US presses the North to return to negotiations. The question, however, is whether his mission will hinder or help the process.

From a professional diplomat’s vantage, the answer is obvious.

“Park’s excursion into North Korea was a foolhardy stunt that can’t help but complicate diplomacy,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, a former State Department official, now with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “It’s a gift to the Pyongyang regime, which can be expected to seek to bargain his freedom for diplomatic or PR advantage.”

Fitzpatrick doubts, moreover, if the US will rush to help him – or if any savior will descend from the heavens as did former US president Bill Clinton when he flew into Pyongyang on a chartered jet last August to pick up the two American television journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, who were captured on the Tumen River frontier and held for 140 days.

“The US government can’t ignore the plight of citizens who are in trouble abroad,” Fitzpatrick noted, “but I doubt the White House or State Department will be inclined to want to give away anything to gain Park’s freedom, especially since he might decide in the future to do it again. It’s not so much as embarrassment as an unnecessary encumbrance.”

As far as Vollertsen is concerned, though, Park is accomplishing his mission by garnering publicity abroad even if he gets nowhere in spreading the word inside the North. Moreover, Vollertsen believes foreign media coverage will eventually bring about his release.

“You and your colleagues are his life insurance,” he said. “He has already achieved media coverage about human-rights abuses in North Korea.” If “people start to ask why he was so ‘crazy’,” said Vollertsen, the proper answer is that “Jesus Christ was also very radical and called crazy”.

Nor does Vollertsen think Park’s presence will compromise attempts at negotiations with the North. “I hope that there is a huge diplomatic issue,” he said, with “a controversial debate in all the newspapers and blogs calling him an idiot and making fun about his insanity’ – and more people willing to follow his example.”

Fitzpatrick disagreed. “One can’t help but sympathize with Park’s moral courage,” he told me, but might Kim Jong-il decide Park’s life was not worth sparing if he were otherwise to go home with tales of his struggle to convert the heathen in Kim’s kingdom? “He certainly is on the side of the angels,” as Fitzpatrick put it, “but that could become literal.”

Donald Kirk, a long-time journalist in Asia, is author of the newly published Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine

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