October 30, 2001	Tuesday	Shaba'an 12, 1422

SEOUL: Just last year, when a group of South Koreans returned home from a mid-August trip to Pyongyang - a visit authorized by their own government - seven were arrested at the airport here and imprisoned for expressing pro-North sentiments and fraternizing with North Koreans.

Their alleged crime: violating the country’s anti-Communist National Security Law. Their trials begin on Monday. The arrests illustrate the problems and paradoxes of the draconian law, which has long been attacked by domestic and international human rights groups and seems particularly out of sync with the South Korean president’s policy of engagement with the North.

The South Korean Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, conscience, press and assembly. But the National Security Law, enacted in 1948, imposes sentences of up to seven years for those who praise, encourage or sympathize with ‘anti-state’ groups such as North Korea. Over the years, thousands have been arrested and imprisoned under the law - including Kim Dae Jung, who was a dissident before he was elected president in 1997.

Those recently prosecuted include Song Hak Sam, 56, a Korean American from New York who wrote a book called ‘Kim Jong Il’s Reunification Strategy,’ for which he and his South Korean publisher were accused of spreading North Korean ideology. He received a two and a half year sentence, suspended for three years.

The most prominent of the seven men arrested at the airport is Kang Jeong Koo, a sociology professor at Dongguk University here who has since been released. He was indicted for writing in a guest book at Mangyondae, the birthplace of North Korea’s late ‘Great Leader,’ Kim Il Sung: “Let’s uphold the Mangyondae spirit to accomplish the great task of national unification.”

The six other men - who, according to their lawyers, did nothing more than fraternize with North Korean counterparts in the Pan-Korean Alliance for Reunification - remain in jail. The lawyers say prosecutors probably will try to prove that the six members of the alliance, which is outlawed in the South, made the trip to hold meetings with the North Korean chapter. In the past, alliance members from the two chapters have met surreptitiously in third countries.

The seven defendants were among about 350 South Korean delegates - including teachers, farmers and members of religious groups - who attended the inter-Korean Liberation Day festivities in Pyongyang on Aug 15-21. All the delegates had the South Korean government’s approval to make the trip.

Technically, the two Koreas are still at war, with a heavily fortified border between them. Criticism of the North and concern about its intentions have mounted in recent weeks as Kim Jong Il has failed to live up to promises he made at last year’s summit, including rebuilding an inter-Korean railroad and visiting the South. The North’s eleventh-hour cancellation of a round of family reunions scheduled for this month exacerbated the concern of conservatives in the South.

The law seems particularly anachronistic now that Kim has ushered in a ‘sunshine policy’ promoting dialogue with the North. The policy led to last year’s summit, in which the two leaders vowed to promote reunification. There have been several subsequent rounds of high-level talks, as well as reunions between a few hundred of the estimated 10 million people in the two nations who have family members on the other side of the border. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.