* Bae has been put to work plowing and planting fields
* Sister says he is “broken, diminished,” has lost weight
* Few letters or phone calls in past nine months
By Eric M. Johnson
LYNNWOOD, Wash., Aug 7 (Reuters) – Kenneth Bae, a U.S.
citizen imprisoned in North Korea for crimes against the state,
made a fresh appeal to the U.S. government for help and
chronicled his declining health in a letter that reached his
family on Wednesday, his sister said.
Bae was sentenced in early May to 15 years of hard labor
after North Korea’s Supreme Court convicted him of state
subversion, saying the 45-year-old Christian missionary had used
his tourism business to form groups to overthrow the government.
Bae has been held since he was detained in November as he
led a tour group through the northern region of the country. His
sentencing came amid acrimonious relations between Pyongyang and
Washington over the reclusive state’s nuclear aspirations.
“He said it is definitely getting harder for his body to
withstand the day-to-day labor, but he is trying his best to be
strong and hold on,” Bae’s sister, Terri Chung, told Reuters in
an interview at her mother’s home in a Seattle suburb. The
letter was written July 14.
Bae spends eight hours a day, six days a week planting and
plowing fields of potatoes and beans among other work at a
prison for foreigners near Pyongyang where he is kept largely
isolated, Chung said.
A naturalized U.S. citizen born in South Korea who most
recently lived in China, Bae has back pain, an enlarged heart,
hypertension and diabetes and his vision has started to blur,
Chung said.
“His health is deteriorating and he asks us to have our
government help to bring him home,” said Chung, who teaches
English at a Seattle community college.
North Korea has in the past used the release of high-profile
American prisoners as a means of garnering a form of prestige or
acceptance, rather than economic gain, by portraying visiting
dignitaries as paying homage to the country and its leader.
That pattern has complicated the response from U.S.
lawmakers and the State Department, which has called for Bae’s
immediate release on “humanitarian grounds” but has resisted
sending high-profile envoys to negotiate, as it has done in the
past.
Reports last month that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter
was set to visit North Korea to negotiate for Bae were
ultimately denied as false.
VIGIL PLANNED
An Internet petition urging U.S. President Barack Obama to
secure “Special Amnesty” for Bae has garnered more than 7,000
signatures and Bae’s family plans a prayer vigil in Seattle on
Saturday.
Bae has acknowledged being a missionary and has said he
conducted religious services in the North. He has said he was
moved by his faith to preach in North Korea, ranked for years as
the nation most hostile to Christianity by Open Doors
International, a Christian advocacy and aid group.
The random trickle of correspondence from Bae and the muted
response from Washington have taken a toll on his tight-knit
family in the United States. Chung said the family has received
five sets of letters and two sets of phone calls – to his wife,
mother and sister – in the nine months.
Chung declined to share the precise content of her brother’s
letters or to confirm whether they had been screened by North
Korean officials. She hoped to learn more from tourists who had
traveled with Bae on forays into Rason, a special economic zone
in the northern part of the country for foreign investors. Human
rights activists in South Korea say Bae may have been arrested
for taking pictures of starving children.
“I do remember him coming home from one of these trips in
North Korea and talking about visiting orphanages and feeling
just really compelled to help,” said Chung, sitting near a
collection of family photos hung on the wall.
Chung, in exchanges brokered by the State department and a
foreign embassy, has offered her brother bittersweet anecdotes
about a Fourth of July celebration, a youth soccer tournament,
and being so preoccupied with his arrest that the “tooth fairy”
forgot for several days to swap money for her child’s detached
tooth.
The family’s doctor sends medicine. Bae’s wife, in China,
has sent toothpaste and shampoo. And his mother, Myunghee Bae,
has sent clippings of bible verses.
The worst moment for Chung came when media producers asked
her and her mother to confirm Bae’s identity in a still-image
taken from prison interview footage before it was to be aired.
Bae, wearing a dirty, blue-gray prison uniform, looked
“broken, diminished” and 30 to 40 pounds (14 to 18 kg) lighter.
“My mom just broke down into these sobs … it was so
gut-wrenching,” she said.
(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Jackie Frank)
