South Korean Hostage Situation

South Korea has complex reaction to Afghan hostage situation
By Choe Sang-Hun

From the International Herald Tribune
Thursday, August 2, 2007

SEOUL: South Koreans felt sorry for the 21 South Korean aid workers held in captivity by the Taliban for over two weeks. But being sorry, many of them said Thursday, did not cover the range of emotions the nation felt about the hostage crisis that has put it through a wrenching ordeal.

"My friends and I first wondered," Shim Sae Rom, a political science major at Ewha Woman's University in Seoul, said. "Why did the church send those people to a place the government had advised them not to travel? What were they thinking?

"Then I felt frustrated with our country's lack of means to save them," she added. "I pray for their safe return. But besides being deeply sorry for them, I find the whole situation very stressful."

When the 23 South Koreans, most of them women in their 20s and 30s, were kidnapped July 19 in Afghanistan, the Taliban took an entire society hostage. Television networks in South Korea interrupt programming for live, regular updates. The Internet is full of emotional comments about a country - and a group - most here had seldom heard of until U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and South Korea later contributed forces of its own.

"The shock and helplessness South Koreans feel is the same kind that a family feels when its child is kidnapped," said Jun Hee Kyung, an official at Citizens Union of Better Society, a civic group in Seoul. "People should stop assigning blame at least for the time being and focus on how we can save the hostages."
South Korean and Afghan officials searched for a meeting place Thursday after agreeing to hold face-to-face talks with the Taliban over the fate of the remaining 21 captives, said Waheedullah Mujadidi, head of the Afghan delegation that is negotiating with the Taliban, The Associated Press reported.
The government and Saemmul Presbyterian Church, to which the hostages belonged, have emphasized that the nurses, English teachers and homemakers went to the Islamic country to provide aid at hospitals and schools, not to spread Christianity.

With two of the 23 hostages killed by their captors, family members compared their daily experience of waiting for more news to "living in Auschwitz."
Still, some Internet bloggers have launched vicious attacks on the Presbyterian churches that have sent people to some of the world's most dangerous places. The virulent criticism was highly unusual for South Korea, which has embraced Christianity in the last century, creating a harmonious confluence of religions in what once was a predominantly Buddhist country.

"Yes, let's pray for their safe return, only if to see them kneel down and apologize to the people for the Protestants' arrogant and blatant behavior," one person wrote on one Internet bulletin board.

On the Internet also is a photograph of three of the 16 women at the airport on July 13, when the group left for Afghanistan. The picture shows them smiling and making V-signs in front of a government notice that asked people to refrain from traveling to Afghanistan.

"People who have been unhappy with the way churches here proselytized launched what can be seen as very cruel attacks against those hostages, who are in a life-or-death situation," said Kim Dong Choon, a sociology professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. "They wonder why the whole country should go through this ordeal just because of them."

But after the two hostages were killed public emotions shifted more toward sympathy for the remaining 21.

South Koreans also began asking why their country had sent troops to Afghanistan in the first place and why they should suffer in a war that is America's business.

"It appears that more people have begun thinking that the United States should be responsible, that the United States holds the key to ending the crisis," Kim said. "In contrast, criticism of the Taliban is not as widespread as one would expect."

A delegation of eight South Korean lawmakers has gone to the United States to try to persuade Washington and the United Nations to help end the standoff. The trip came after Kabul and Washington rejected South Korean appeals for "flexibility" on the key Taliban demand - swapping rebel prisoners with the Korean hostages.

When 20 Saemmul Church members took a group picture at the airport on July 13, all smiling and raising clinched fists, they exuded an optimism and pride that in a sense are characteristic of their generation.

Unlike their parents, who survived the deprivation of the decades after the Korean War with the help of foreign aid, these young adults grew up amid the affluence of the world's 12th largest economy and have recently begun embracing the idea of going overseas on aid missions.

At the forefront of this trend are churches. Protestant believers now comprise one-fifth of the country's 48 million population, barely a century after the first arrival of American missionaries.

"Besides missionary work, we also intend to show how much South Korea has grown and that we are now able to share with other people in need around the world," said Lee Chan Min, an official at International Youth Fellowship. Lee's group sends 770 students a year on yearlong aid missions to more than 70 countries, including Egypt, Turkey, Togo and Sudan.

"As the Peace Corps movement of U.S. President John F. Kennedy did with American youths, our program will help expand South Korean youths' international perspectives," Lee said. "It will eventually expand South Koreans' influence and status abroad."

But Lee admitted that the hostage crisis in Afghanistan has made groups like his more cautious that they should "not cross the line from medical and volunteer aid work into the kind of missionary work that could put our people in danger."

Long before this crisis, some Korean churches' zeal for going to the world's most dangerous places raised hackles. In 2004, eight Korean missionaries were kidnapped, and released, in Iraq. That same year, a man who had gone to Iraq hoping to do missionary work was beheaded. Last year, about 1,600 South Korean Christians, including children, who gathered in Afghanistan for a peace festival were deported because of safety concerns.

Park Eun Jo, the main pastor of Saemmul Church, said the kidnapping was "unexpected," since his church's 200 aid missions in Afghanistan in the past few years had gone without a hitch. These captives had been on a 10-day mission when they were seized on a road between Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar on July 19.

Park's deputy, Bae Hyung Kyu, was killed last week. Another member of the church, Shim Sung Min, a former information-technology worker, was killed Monday.

On Wednesday evening, grim-faced members flocked into the five-story former shopping center that houses Saemmul Church in Bundang, an upscale town south of Seoul. Hymns and prayers drifted from the church's many rooms.
In an "apology to the people," Park said that his church was withdrawing other aid workers - numbering about 40, he said - from Afghanistan.

"Our people went to Afghanistan because they loved the country. They were people with a noble dream who saved money and used their summer vacation to realize humanitarianism," Park said.

"I may sound shameless, but I ask the people to pray for their safe return home."

Questions to consider:

1. Who is to blame for the hostage situation?

2. Should the members of the church group apologize to South Koreans?

3. Do you think missionary work can "expand South Korean's influence and status abroad" as Lee Chan Min claimed?