North Korea has a well-thumbed playbook for detained American citizens who are valuable diplomatic bargaining chips for the regime, but the case of Otto Warmbier, flown home in a coma this week, is a glaring exception. The script is simple and familiar: arrest an…
Seoul (AFP) – North Korea has a well-thumbed playbook for detained American citizens who are valuable diplomatic bargaining chips for the regime, but the case of Otto Warmbier, flown home in a coma this week, is a glaring exception.
The script is simple and familiar: arrest an American, hold a show trial ending with a lengthy jail term, release them in exchange for a high-profile visit — Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have both helped free detainees in the past — which is used for domestic propaganda.
« With Otto Warmbier they wanted to play the same game again, » Andrei Lankov, Korearisk.com director and professor at Kookmin University, told AFP.
When it works, « it’s a brilliant propaganda coup, » for the regime, he said.
Warmbier, a 22-year-old University of Virginia student from Cincinnati who was in North Korea as a tourist, looked set to follow the usual pattern. He tried to steal a propaganda poster, was arrested and sentenced to 15 years of hard labour at a show trial.
But then something went wrong.
« If you are always playing games, one day things are going to backfire. This is pretty much what happened in this case, » Lankov said.
Doctors treating Warmbier in the US, where he arrived this week after being released by Pyongyang on « humanitarian grounds », said that the student is in « a state of unresponsive wakefulness, » having suffered a severe brain injury, most likely due to a cardiopulmonary arrest.
The US doctors could not prove what triggered this but said they had found no signs of a botulism infection — the official explanation given by the North Korean regime for how the young man fell into a coma.
