North Korea shamelessly forced an 85-year-old military veteran into video recording an apology for “offensive acts” he was allegedly planning against the kooky hermit nation.
Merrill Newman of Palo Alto, Calif., had been visiting North Korea with a pal from his retirement home when authorities pulled him off a plane on Oct. 26.
He hadn’t been seen or heard from until Saturday, when his forced confession was broadcast by the Korean Central News Agency.
Newman “confessed” to hooking up with a family of guerrilla fighters he claimed to have trained in the war, in hopes of stirring up new internal anti-North Korean strife.
“Although I committed the indelible offensive acts against the Korean people in the period of the Korean War, I have been guilty of big crimes against the DPRK government and Korean people again,” Newman read from papers in front of him. “Please forgive me.”
DPRK stands for totalitarian North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
As disturbing and creepy as Newman’s forced show may have been, it will probably end up being a key act toward his eventual release, analysts said.
“Clearly this was written for him,” said Frank Januzzi, deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA and former East Asia specialist for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “And hopefully this will be a step toward making him eligible for clemency, showing the benevolence of the North Korean judicial system and of course the leader.”
“As I have said before, there has to be a terrible misunderstanding,” said Newman’s travel partner and retirement-home neighbor Bob Hamrdla, a former Stanford University professor.
Newman’s family has previously said the retired finance executive and Red Cross volunteer served three years in the Korean conflict as an infantryman. Defense officials on Saturday declined to detail Newman’s war record.
But former South Korean guerrilla fighters told Reuters news agency that the retiree trained the secretive Kuwol Regiment during the war. The partisan fighters went behind enemy lines and famously attacked North Korean outposts up and down the peninsula’s west coast.
“In the eyes of the North Koreans, he would have literally been a spy engaging in some kind of espionage activity,” said 86-year-old former guerrilla fighter Kim Hyeon. “I wouldn’t go there [to North Korea if I were him].”