North Korea sentenced two female US journalists to 12 years in a labour camp Monday for illegal entry and an unspecified "grave crime," further fuelling tensions with Washington after testing a nuclear bomb. US President Barack Obama was "deeply concerned" about the sentences handed down to Laura Ling and Euna Lee, and his government was using "all possible channels" to obtain their release, the White House said.
A five-day trial "confirmed the grave crime they committed against the Korean nation and their illegal border crossing," the official Korean Central News Agency said, without explaining the crime. The Central Court "sentenced each of them to 12 years of reform through labour."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday the charges against the pair are baseless and they should be allowed to return home. Clinton also said the United States was considering putting North Korea back on its terrorism blacklist following its recent nuclear and missile tests.
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly on Monday called for the pair's release. "We think that the government in North Korea should release them on humanitarian grounds," he told reporters. Border guards detained the TV reporters on March 17 along the frontier with China while they were researching a story about refugees fleeing the North.
The North has been showing an increasingly uncompromising face to the world since it fired a long-range rocket on April 5. After the United Nations Security Council punished the launch by tightening sanctions, the North responded on May 25 with its second nuclear test.
It has also renounced the armistice on the Korean peninsula and is said to be preparing to test medium-range missiles and a long-range Taepodong-2. Pyongyang on Monday vowed to retaliate if the Council adopts a resolution punishing the atomic test. Analysts say the women will become pawns in North Korea's efforts to open direct negotiations with the United States.
The North has long made clear its preference for direct talks with Washington over the stalled six-party negotiations on nuclear disarmament, of which the US is a part. The sentences "are tougher than expected," said Yoo Ho-Yeol, a North Korea expert at Korea University, adding that they show "the North's strategy to bring the United States to the bilateral negotiating table."
Cheong Seong-Chang of Seoul's Sejong Institute think-tank said North Korea will consider releasing the pair "if Washington accepts Pyongyang's demand for (direct) talks." Pyongyang has in the past freed captured Americans but only after personal interventions. The US State Department last week did not rule out a mission by former vice president Al Gore.
Gore is chairman of the California station Current TV which employs the two journalists, both aged in their thirties. Both are married and Lee has a four-year-old daughter. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, a former US ambassador to the United Nations who has negotiated with North Korea, said he had been contacted by the Obama administration for advice on the case.
Calling the charges "harsher than expected," Richardson told NBC's "Today Show" that any talk of a US envoy for the case was "premature" because a framework for negotiations had to be established first. Media freedom group Reporters Without Borders said it was "appalled" by the sentences and was joined by the US-based Society of Professional Journalists in calling on Pyongyang to reverse the decision.
Friends, family and colleagues held candlelight vigils for the women in US cities last week. Their relatives have appealed for clemency and urged the two governments not to link the case to the nuclear stand-off. The North on May 26 allowed them to phone their families in the United States.
"We had not heard their voices in over two and a half months," said Ling's sister Lisa. "They are very scared - they're very, very scared." Convicts sentenced to "reform through labour" are typically subject to hard work at farms, mines, construction sites or factories, Cho Myung-Chul, a former defector and now an analyst, told Yonhap news agency.