TOKYO: North Korea failed in its attempt to push heroin in Australia, but its evil agents have been running an even more horrific program, kidnapping and brainwashing foreign nationals from around the world.
It sounds like the plot of The Manchurian Candidate, but no one knows the extent of the operation - only that many people were abducted and hidden from sight north of the38th parallel.
It's impossible to plumb the depths of lunacy that directs North Korean leader Kim Jong-il because, as Sakie and Shigeru Yokota tragically know, there are no limits to the iniquity of his foul regime. {Click on image for details}
Their daughter, Megumi, is but one of a number of Japanese kidnapped by the North Koreans for use as a training tool in the communist country's spy schools. She was 13 when she was snatched while walking the two blocks to her home after badminton practice at her school in Niigata, on the shore of the Sea of Japan, on November 15, 1977.
ReplyDeleteDuring a meeting last week at the complex where they now live near Tokyo, the Yokotas told me it had initially been assumed that Megumi had been kidnapped because her father managed the local branch of the Bank of Japan. The only ransom request ever received, however, was from a fraudster.
For six years, Sakie Yokota's heart stopped whenever she heard a car stop near their home. She would go to the window, always hoping a visitor would be bringing news.
None came, and the bank eventually transferred Shigeru Yokota away from the district.
The first hint of North Korea's involvement was gleaned in 1996 from North Korean defectors who that hundreds of people had been abducted and held as specimens for trainee spies to study.
Left-wing sympathisers in Japan vociferously responded, denouncing the claims and protesting that the peace-loving North Koreans would not be party to any such program.
They were proved profoundly wrong, as further information leaked out, including the claim that among those abducted was a young woman who had been seized when she saw North Korean agents boarding a boat on a secluded beach.
They thought she was carrying a badminton racquet when taken, and that she may have been a twin. Megumi wasn't a twin, but she did have twin brothers, and those vague links gave the Yokotas hope that their daughter was still alive.
With North Koreans facing starvation, Kim Jong-il was forced to try to normalise relations with Japan in 2002.
Among the sweeteners he held out to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was the admission that North Korea had kidnapped at least 13 Japanese, of whom only five were still alive.
Megumi Yokota, he said, was one of the eight who were supposedly dead, killed in car accidents (in a nation in which cars are rarities), unfortunate gas explosions and other incredible circumstances.
The five acknowledged abductees were returned to Japan,but an investigation by theJapanese Government determined that at least 17 of its nationals, and possibly many more, may have been abducted and found that the North Koreans were hiding the facts.
The Yokotas were given an urn said to contain their daughter's ashes, but DNA testing failed to show conclusively that they were her remains - although they showed they appeared to be those of two unrelated people.
DNA testing of Megumi's daughter, and her Japanese and South Korean grandmothers, established they were indeed related.
The Yokotas would like their grand-daughter to visit them, but she is clearly under the control of the North Korean Government.
The first time she was produced, she said she would like to study to become a doctor; a short time later, she amended that. Her intention now is to be a good party official.
Megumi's husband, Kim Yong Nam, who has remarried, was reunited with his 78-year-old mother, Choi Gye Wol, at a North Korean resort last week.
In 1978, when he was 16, he was abducted from a beach on South Korea's south-west coast.
In the absence of any solid evidence to the contrary, the Yokotas believe their daughter may still be alive.
Their campaign on her behalf, and that of as many as 400 other people who may still be held in North Korea, has given them an international profile.
Tom Scheiffer, the US ambassador in Tokyo, told me Sakie Yokota's imposing dignity had so impressed him that President Bush had met her and heard her plea for help infinding her daughter.
Film producer Jane Campion has just released a documentary about Megumi called Abduction, and the issue of the abductees will remain a sticking point.
The Yokotas have been lied to so often by the North Koreans, and have seen so much evidence of the regime's cruelty, that they're fighting not just for their daughter but to prevent the lives of other innocents being destroyed.
Their goodness shines as an antidote to the awful evil personified by Kim Jong-il and must be supported by freedom-loving people everywhere.
akermanp@sundaytelegraph.com.au