Obama Said To Back Away From 2005 N. Korea Ultimatum

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WASHINGTON — Korean-American human rights groups are claiming that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is backing away from a 2005 ultimatum to Pyongyang.

In an interview yesterday, the executive director of the Korean Church Coalition for North Korean Freedom, Sam Kim, said he traveled to Congress in early June to remind Illinois legislators of a 2005 letter signed by Senator Obama, among others, that called on the North Korean regime to provide details about the case of the Reverend Kim Dong-Shik. Rev. Kim, who helped North Korean refugees flee to China, was abducted by North Korean agents in China in 2000 and believed to be in one of the regime’s gulags.

After President Bush announced last week that he would begin the process of removing North Korea from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, both Senator McCain and Mr. Obama said in statements that they would wait to see whether North Korea met its disarmament requirements before endorsing the move. But neither candidate said his support for adjusting North Korea’s status was contingent on the fate of Rev. Kim.

This was not Mr. Obama’s position in his first year in office. The January 28, 2005, letter he signed, sent to North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations, Pak Gil Yon, said: “We will NOT support the removal of your government from the State Department list of State Sponsors of Terrorism until such time, among other reasons, as a full accounting is provided to the Kim family regarding the fate of Reverend Kim Dong-Shik following his abduction into North Korea five years ago.”

The letter compared Rev. Kim to Harriet Tubman, who helped slaves escape to the North before the Civil War, and to Raoul Wallenberg, who helped save Hungarian Jews from Nazi concentration camps. “We view Reverend Kim Dong-Shik as also being a hero who assisted with the escape of the powerless and forgotten,” Mr. Obama and 19 of his Illinois congressional colleagues wrote in the letter.

Rev. Kim’s wife, a Chicago resident, has told newspaper reporters that she fears her husband may be dead.

Yesterday, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, Tommy Vietor, said: “Senator Obama believes we should not lift sanctions on North Korea until North Korea has met its obligations to provide a complete and accurate declaration about all its nuclear weapons programs and clarified the allegations about its proliferation activities, including to Syria. He also remains deeply concerned about North Korean abduction of foreign citizens and expects a full accounting of their circumstances.”

Sam Kim said he was frustrated by Mr. Obama’s silence on Rev. Kim. “We are talking about a human rights worker who was kidnapped, abducted from China by two North Korean agents, one of which was ultimately convicted in South Korea by the Roh administration, and the congressional representative from the state of Illinois, where the wife resides, is refusing to comment on the issue. Everybody is saying they don’t remember it,” he said.

Mr. Kim said he met with a member of Mr. Obama’s staff June 6 to raise the issue. He said in an e-mail that he told the staffer the senator “would lack credibility to the world and his management of foreign affairs would be put into question and show weakness, when in dealing with a terrorist country like North Korea, the Senator one day declares that he will oppose any delisting of North Korea, and then later, simply changes his mind and supports delisting, without North Korea ever complying with any of his prior demands.”

In Democratic primary debates, Mr. Obama said he would meet with leaders of rogue states, though he has said over the last month that he would not meet with Iranian leaders if it was not in America’s interest. As a general rule, the Illinois senator has defended diplomacy with American adversaries on the grounds that presidents Kennedy and Reagan negotiated with the Soviet Union.

The chairwoman of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, Suzanne Scholte, said yesterday that her group, which comprises more than 70 nongovernmental organizations, was “deeply disappointed that Senator Obama has backed away from his initial ultimatum to the North Koreans.”

She added, however, that she was also disappointed in Mr. Bush. “Our feeling with President Bush is that this is a regime whose cruelty knows no bounds,” she said. “The things this regime is capable of are beyond human understanding. That we would fail to account for someone like Reverend Kim Dong-Shik, who is really a modern-day hero, is unconscionable.”


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