Published on November 05, 2005

Delicate and dedicated diplomatic steps will be needed to resolve the Anocha case. Dark diplomacy snatched Ano-cha Panjoy from her happy, smiling life 27 years ago.

Bringing her back from the world’s most reclusive nation will require all the good sides of international relations to work relentlessly at full force.

The North Korean Embas-sy’s immediate response to the heartbreaking story of Anocha simply underscores the forbidding nature of the task ahead.

“I don’t have any information,” Kim Chol-nam, the counsellor at the embassy, told The Nation yesterday.

The statement confirms that to bring this ordinary woman back home where she belongs, extraordinary, subtle and perhaps complicated diplomatic manoeuvres have to be made by all parties and countries

concerned. Japan has boosted her family’s hopes by promising cooperation with Bangkok, which has awoken to the missing woman’s plight.

Now that Sukham Panjoy, 59, has come forward to ask for more information about the disappearance of his sister 27 years ago, allegedly at the hands of North Korean kidnappers, the Foreign Ministry is dispatching a team of officials to interview her family in Chiang Mai’s San Kamphaeng district.

Foreign Ministry spokes-man Sihasak Phuangketkeow said the ministry wanted to find out more about Anocha and her family as soon as possible so that the government could proceed to the next step.

The ministry has asked its embassy in Tokyo to make a request to the Japanese government, which played an important role in uniting Charles Robert Jenkins with his wife, Hiromi Soga, and their two daughters.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said in his weekly press conference that his government would follow up on the case.

Based on the way Japan handled the issue of its citizens snatched by North Korea in the 1970’s, Anocha’s fate will depend on Thaksin’s intervention as well as local sentiment.

In Japan, Prime Minister Junichi Koizumi placed top priority on the reported 11 abducted Japanese by raising the issue with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il when they met for the first time in September 2002. At that meeting, Kim admitted for the first time that the Japanese had been abducted and were still alive. Pyongyang has apologised and promised that it will never happen again.

Long before North Korea’s confession, the Japanese government had established 15 cases of abduction. Tokyo raised them with Pyongyang several times, but the latter denied any knowledge of them. In 1997 the Association of the Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea was established in Japan to help the families of the abductees.

With such a coalition, Japanese politicians and MPs both in the home towns of abductees and beyond joined forces and have steadily pressured the government to raise the issue with the North Korean government.

They have demanded their government withhold further assistance until full accounts of those abductees are made. Public opinion wants the government to get all Japanese back home as soon as possible before any normalisation of relations.

As prime minister, Koizumi has kept his promise to bring back the abductees. He managed to bring five of them back to Japan, but they were separated from their families. Hiromi Soga, wife of Charles Robert Jenkins, a US army deserter, left Pyongyang with the first batch in October 2002. Through continued pressure from Japan, she was later joined by Jenkins and her two daughters when they came to Japan last November. Tokyo continues to dig for more information about the remaining Japanese in North Korea.

In Anocha’s case, after interviews of her family members by authorities, the next step will be through diplomatic channels. The Foreign Ministry will meet North Korean diplomats in Bangkok to search for more information.

She disappeared from Macau 27 years ago and is believed to have been abducted by agents and used as a language and culture teacher for Thailand-bound North Korean diplomats.

Thailand and North Korea have so far had cordial relations. The Foreign Ministry recently allowed North Korea to post one extra diplomat here.

Should it become clear that Anocha is indeed in North Korea and alive, both Thaksin and Foreign Minister Kantathi Suphamongkhon will have to raise the issue at the highest level to secure her return. She is 47 years old. It would be wise to ask if there are more Thais in a similar predicament.

The next step will depend on the North Korean government: if Thai officials can gain access to her and interview her, she will be asked if she wants to return to Thailand, and her wishes will be respected.

According to Jenkins’ book, Anocha’s American husband, Larry Allan Abshier, has died and they did not have any children. If she remarried and has children, the Thai government will also have to interview them.

If the Thai government is reluctant, an international humanitarian organisation such as the International Committee of the Red Cross can provide assistance on humanitarian grounds.

When Kantathi visited Pyongyang in August, he did not know that there was a Thai abductee, and North Korea did not inform Thailand of this either.

Kim Chol-nam told The Nation that the Foreign Ministry had been in touch with the embassy, but he did not elaborate.

At the moment, the embassy is waiting for its new ambassador, Oh Yong-son, to arrive. Oh is currently ambassador at large in Pyongyang.

A source said the Foreign Ministry would dispatch a team of officers to interview Sukham Panjoy for additional information tomorrow.

If necessary, Sukham and her relatives, including those who knew Anocha, will be brought to Bangkok for interview.

Abductions of Japanese nationals by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s are a priority topic for Japan in this week’s talks between the two countries in Beijing. Koizumi has instructed Japanese negotiators to tackle the talks with North Korea under Tokyo’s basic policy on the abduction issue and said he cannot predict how the discussions in Beijing will proceed.

The Japanese government has been seeking concrete information on abduction victims, who North Korea claims have died after since being taken to the country, and demanding that any surviving be repatriated.

Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso said he had not heard that North Korea had made any “particularly new proposal” to Japan at Thursday’s meeting regarding the abduction issue.

Representing North Korea, Song Il-ho, vice director of the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s Asian Affairs Department, indicated that North Korea planned to propose to Japan a path towards a potential resolution of the abduction issue.

Aso also said Japan and Thailand could work together to address the Anocha case.

“This kind of issue violates our countries’ national sovereignty. In that context, one way of thinking is for both countries to jointly take measures to address it,” Aso said.

Jenkins writes in a memoir of his life in North Korea, released last month in Japan, that he met or saw many people in North Korea he believed were abductees, including the woman from Thailand.

Kavi Chongkittavorn

The Nation

Post your comment to this story here