Detainee Update: Tony Kim

Since this blog was launched, it has been a sad task to keep track of the fate of detained Americans (see all of our linked posts below). Here we go again, but with a very different context. With the Trump administration ramping up the rhetoric, has North Korea just seized a hostage?   

The latest detainee is Sang-duk (Tony) Kim. Kim had been teaching an accounting course at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) and was on his way out of the country when he was stopped at the airport. He is now the third American currently being held by the regime, following long prison sentences meted out last year to Kim Dong-chul and Otto Warmbier. Another westerner, Canadian pastor Hyeon Soo Lim, has been held since February 2015 as well, and on a life sentence.

Pyongyang University of Science and Technology is a collaborative effort between the DPRK’s Ministry of Education and the Northeast Asia Foundation for Education and Culture (NAFEC), a South Korean non-profit. Founded by Korean-American Chin-Kyung (James) Kim, who was once a prisoner in North Korea accused of espionage, the university opened to students in 2010. It offers a range of undergraduate and graduate majors, mostly in technical areas that don’t veer too far into the political: agriculture and life sciences, engineering, foreign languages, and the medical sciences with business being the one potentially subversive discipline. The presumption of the effort: that knowledge about the world is ultimately progressive.

Needless to say, PUST’s engagement narrative has been challenged by charges that it is doing little more than educating the regime’s elite to highly uncertain political effect. (And the male elite at that; in 2015 a small cohort of women was enrolled for the first time.) Suki Kim’s kiss-and-tell memoir of her time teaching at the university provides an introduction, although it was as much about Suki Kim as the school. (See my review here). In December 2015, the school suffered an embarrassment when two North Korean defectors claimed that graduates of the university have been assigned to the military for cyber terrorism purposes.

Already allegedly in difficult financial straits, the university is trying to assure would-be faculty and donors that Tony Kim’s detention has nothing to do with his affiliation with or activities at PUST (the university’s press release can be found here.) Ironically, the university’s faculty and funding base draws heavily on Christian-affiliated organizations, and Suki Kim’s memoir shows that administration and faculty are scrupulously cautious.

As of yet, there has been no mention of Tony Kim’s case in North Korea media so we don’t know what the charges are. The natural inclination is to think that any charges are likely to be completely trumped-up, and in this case that may actually prove true. But we have seen before that a good number of the detainees were in fact held for obvious violations of North Korean law, which is not particularly strong on political liberties and civil rights. As wrenching as these cases are for the families, much diplomatic time and energy has been spent on freeing some detainees who bear more than a little responsibility for their incarceration.

In this case, though, it is hard to believe that a clever bit of asymmetric warfare isn’t at work. “You are threatening us? We have some tools, too.” Whatever the story, our hearts go out to Tony Kim’s family and the PUST community.  

Previous Posts on the Detainees

• Detainees and Envoys (April 2013; on the possible North Korean motive of securing visits by high level envoys)
• Detained Americans: Not-So-Innocents Abroad (September 2013; brief outlines of the American detainees up to that point)
• Merrill Newman “Confesses” (November 2013)
• Why is Kenneth Bae Treated More Harshly than John Short? (March 2014)
• Miller Matthew Todd (April 2014; how Miller’s name was initially reported by KCNA)
• State Department Travel Advisory Update (June 2014)
• Slave to the Blog: Abductions and Detainees Edition (June 2014; Fowle detention)
• Detainee Update and Canadians in Dandong (early August 2014 stories on the three Americans and the sweep against Christians along the Chinese side of the border)
• The Release of Jeffrey Fowle (October 2014)
• Bae and Miller Released, The Excellent Adventures of Matthew Todd Miller and James Clapper and The Hostage Rorschach Test (November 2014)
• Arturo Pierre Mendez
• Mike Chinoy on Merrill Newman 
• Kim Kuk-ki and Choe Chun-gil (March 2015)
• Detainee Fatigue: Won-Moon Joo (June 2015)
• Hyeon Soo Lim Update (August 2015)
• The Release of Won-Moon Joo (October 2015)
• State Department Travel Advisory Update (November 2015)
• Life Sentence for Hyeon Soo Lim (December 2015)
• Otto Warmbier and Kim Dong Chul (January 2015)
• Detainee Update: Otto Warmbier and Otto Warmrbier: 15 Years (March 2016)
• Arturo Pierre Martinez Back in the USA (April 2016)
• Ten Years for Kim Dong Chul and Kenneth Bae Speaks (May 2016)
• Detainee Update: The North Korean Message (July, 2016; North Korea claims it is dealing with detainee issues on the basis of “wartime law”)
• Detainee Update: The David Sneddon Case (September 2016)