China holds journalist captive

When Seok Jae-hyun agreed to photograph an undercover boat rescue of North Korean refugees, the mission matched both his professional ambition and his growing sympathy with fellow Koreans living in the bitter gulags of the North.

Now the young man is sitting in a military prison near Yantai, China. He was arrested Jan. 18, along with 60 to 80 refugees, before even reaching two fishing boats bought for the escape.

So far, China has not recognized Mr. Seok's status as a journalist; he is charged with "people smuggling" - carrying a sentence of five years to life. Tuesday at the People's Superior Court in Shandong he has a public hearing to determine if the charges are correct. A review will decide whether Seok was an accessory, an organizer, or neither, according to Judge Zhu Bing, one of a three-judge panel.

Some 136 journalists languish in prisons around the world. China claims the most, at 39. Seok, however, is the only foreigner incarcerated there. He has been locked up four months, the most likely reason being that he accompanied one of the high-profile refugee escapes that, in the past year, have been a media embarrassment for Beijing and a security problem. Seok is "being made an example of," according to a diplomatic source in Seoul.

"No foreign journalist has been detained so long in China, before Mr. Seok; this is very unusual," notes Sophie Beach of the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York. "He has broken no laws, he was doing his job."

Seok's young career focused on disabled youth and prisoners, homeless people in the Philippines, and foreign laborers in Korea. Until he started working nearly full time for The New York Times last year, closing up in Seoul at 1 a.m., then driving three hours to Daegu to teach photography, Seok was headed for Japan.

But North Korean refugees put the hook in him. Working for foreign publications, he come in contact with cases of torture, prison-camp escapees, slave-trade victims, and hunger - stories often avoided in a South Korea aiming for better relations with the North. Refugees became his subject - and the Times was a top-notch forum, though his status was as a freelancer.

Colleagues and family say Seok's status isn't in dispute: All his income is from journalism. He's a member of the South Korean Foreign Correspondent's Club, listed under the Times, with five Times photos published in January prior to his arrest; he was recruited four years ago at a photographers conference in France by the Times foreign photo editor Cecelia Bohan, according to Seok's wife, Kang Hae-won. He also contributed quarterly to the Korean edition of Geo magazine.

Fellow journalists say Seok's case highlights the ambiguities and risks when sympathetic freelancers stray past conventional ground rules to capture authentic images. Such "reality" photos are hard to shoot, especially in China where media access is constricted. Yet they are highly prized at newspaper photo desks around the world.

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