South Korea Arrests Activist for Visiting North

SEOUL, South Korea — A South Korean Christian pastor who has fueled a bitter debate by visiting North Korea without government permission was arrested on Friday during his trip home across the heavily guarded border between the countries.

The pastor, the Rev. Han Sang-ryol, a self-styled “unification activist,” was waving a “one-Korea” flag that showed an undivided Korean Peninsula as he stepped across the military demarcation line at the border village of Panmunjom, government officials said. He was immediately whisked away by South Korean authorities for interrogation.

During its so-called sunshine policy of engaging North Korea from 1998 to 2008, the government in Seoul often approved, and sometimes encouraged, visits by South Koreans to the North.

But Mr. Han’s illegal trip has become a thorny issue between the Koreas because it coincides with the deepest chill in inter-Korean relations in years and flouts the South’s new policy of controlling exchanges with the North.

The current inter-Korean tensions have helped turn Mr. Han’s trip into perhaps the most contested one by a South Korean since several activists defied Seoul’s draconian anti-Communist laws and entered North Korea in the late 1980s.

On the northern side of the border, 200 North Koreans bid farewell to Mr. Han, chanting slogans and singing songs about the unification of the Koreas, which were divided at the end of World War II.

In the South, people were divided over Mr. Han’s trip.

“Send him back to North Korea!” yelled 1,000 people who rallied near the border, according to local television reports. Many of them were elderly military veterans in uniforms, and some burned North Korean flags.

South Korean news outlets also showed a rival gathering nearby, a smaller group protesting Mr. Han’s arrest and waving flags showing an undivided peninsula. Police officers were sent to prevent clashes between the groups.

Mr. Han, a vocal supporter of engagement with North Korea and a frequent leader of protests against American policy toward it, entered through China on June 12. Tensions between the countries had already escalated because of a South Korean warship that exploded and sank in March, killing 46 sailors. The South blames the North for the sinking of the ship, the Cheonan, but the North denies involvement.

Mr. Han attended rallies and meetings in North Korea during which he questioned the South Korean investigative report on the ship sinking and accused the government of President Lee Myung-bak of raising tensions. The Lee government became upset because North Korean officials used Mr. Han’s trip and comments to attack the South.

Credit...Korean Central News Agency of DPRK, via Reuters

Mr. Han, who said he was visiting North Korea to promote reconciliation and unification, insisted on returning home through Panmunjom, where an armistice was signed in 1953 to end the fighting in the Korean War.

Mr. Han met Kim Yong-nam, president of the presidium of the North’s Parliament, on Thursday, according to the North’s state-run news agency, KCNA. Calling Mr. Han a “reunification champion,” the news agency denounced Mr. Han’s arrest as “fascist suppression.”

“I do not feel lonely and fearful as I am joined by fellow countrymen in the North and the South and abroad,” Mr. Han said at a farewell ceremony in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, earlier on Friday.

North Korea, one of the world’s most closed countries, selects its guests carefully. Last year it sentenced two American journalists to 12 years of hard labor for illegally entering the North. The reporters were released after five months, but only after former President Bill Clinton paid a visit to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, in Pyongyang last August.

North Korea also arrested Robert Park, a Korean-American Christian who crossed over from China in December to call attention to the dismal conditions at the North’s prison camps. It expelled Mr. Park after 40 days. But it is still holding Aijalon Mahli Gomes, an American from Boston who illegally entered the North in support of Mr. Park.

Then this month, Pyongyang allowed an American teenager to spend a week in the North to promote his idea for a “children’s peace forest” in the demilitarized zone dividing the Koreas.

A South Korean who visits the North without government approval can face several years in prison under the South’s National Security Law, written during the cold war. Several South Koreans have defied the law and made illegal trips.

The most famous case was Im Su-kyong, a student activist who entered the North in 1989 and was arrested upon returning home through Panmunjom. She was sentenced to five years in prison but was paroled in 1992.

Two other prominent South Koreans — Moon Ik-hwan, a Christian pastor, and Seo Kyong-won, an opposition lawmaker — were sentenced to prison for illegally visiting the North in the late 1980s. Hwang Sok-yong, a novelist, was arrested in 1993 for illegally entering the North five times between 1989 and 1991.

These visits, inspired by a global détente after decades of cold war enmity, featured prominently in North Korean propaganda and also helped lead to protests by students calling for reconciliation with the North.

The conservative government responded with police crackdowns. It was not until 2000 that a South Korean president visited Pyongyang for the first summit meeting between the Koreas.

That leader, Kim Dae-jung, introduced the “sunshine policy,” which focused on exchanges and cooperation with the North. The approach was jettisoned by President Lee, who took office in early 2008, vowing to cut off aid and exchanges until the North agreed to give up its nuclear weapons program.