Seoul not mulling sending envoy to free its detainees in N.K

By Tony Chang
SEOUL, Aug. 6 (Yonhap) -- Seoul is not considering sending a special envoy to
North Korea to negotiate the release of South Koreans detained there, the
government said Thursday, an initiative which the United States successfully
employed this week for its detainees in the communist state.
North Korea has been holding a 44-year-old South Korean male worker, identified
only by his surname Yu, at the troubled inter-Korean industrial park at its
border town of Kaesong since late March, accusing him of criticizing its
political system and attempting to persuade a North Korean woman to defect to the
South.
Pyongyang has refused to give out any information on his whereabouts and denied
requests by Seoul for access to him.
North Korea has also detained four crewmen of a squid-fishing boat, who were
taken to an eastern port a week ago after straying 13km past the inter-Korean
maritime border.
"We are not in the process of considering sending a special envoy to the North
... but we are doing everything we can to secure their freedom," Chun Hae-sung,
spokesman for the Unification Ministry, said at a daily press briefing.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton went into Pyongyang on Tuesday and
successfully won the release of two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna
Lee, who were captured at the North Korea-China border on March 17 while working
on a news story about refugees fleeing out of North Korea. They arrived in the
U.S. on Wednesday.
While Washington labeled the trip as strictly a private mission, observers
believe that it was coordinated by the U.S. administration.
Chun said Seoul has requested the North, through maritime communications
channels, to release the boat and its crew.
Except for the day-to-day maritime and land communications, virtually all
high-level channels between the two Koreas have shut down after South Korean
President Lee Myung-bak took office in February last year with a vow to link
cross-border rapprochement with North Korean denuclearization efforts.
"There are no government-to-government communications channel at the moment due
to the North's unilateral cutoff of communication. Therefore, we are utilizing
maritime channels to check on the North's position on the matter," said Chun.
odissy@yna.co.kr
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