Washington.- There has been no response yet. The United States has tried to contact North Korea several times since a US soldier entered the country illegally on Tuesday, but his whereabouts and health status remain unknown because no one has responded.
Communication is very complex since Washington and Pyongyang do not have diplomatic relations and ties are badly damaged, but US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller says there are still “a number of channels through which to send messages to North Korea.”
Miller refused this week to detail what those routes are, but one of them, and perhaps the most striking, is the so-called “pink phone.”
CALL THE PINK PHONE
This is not a metaphor or a fanciful scene from a Cold War movie. This pink phone exists and is installed in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the four-kilometer-wide strip that serves as the border between the two Koreas, which are technically still at war since they ended their conflict in 1953 with a ceasefire instead of a peace treaty.
This is precisely the step that Private Travis King, 23, who had been ordered by the Pentagon to return to the United States after kicking a police car in South Korea, crossed without permission and by surprise.
The pink telephone is a direct telephone line that connects the cabin of the United Nations Command, led by US soldiers, with the North Korean military on the other side, just 40 meters away.
In 2013, according to local US media, the North Koreans cut off its use, so the United Nations Command had to communicate for a while with the other side through a megaphone, but in 2018 the connection was reestablished with two daily calls, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
According to the United Nations Command, the line has remained active and during 2022 at least 98 messages were exchanged through the pink phone.
“Communication is complicated. There are no diplomatic relations between the two countries, but it is not as big an obstacle as it seems. If North Korea wants to talk, they can,” Mitchell Lerner, director of East Asian Studies at Ohio University, told EFE on Friday.
THE SWEDISH WAY
Another of the ways that the Joe Biden government has to contact the Kim Jong-un regime is through an intermediary. The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that it is seeking Swedish mediation.
Stockholm and Pyongyang established diplomatic relations in 1973, after which Sweden became the first Western country to open an embassy in North Korea.
The Swedish diplomatic mission in the North Korean capital often represents the consular interests of other nations such as the United States, Canada, Australia or the Scandinavian countries.
In fact, Sweden played an important role in the preparations for the historic 2018 Singapore summit between Kim Jong-un and then-President of the United States Donald Trump (2017-2021), in the first meeting between leaders of both countries.
Months before the meeting, the North Korean foreign minister had traveled to Sweden to talk about that meeting.
UNITED NATIONS CONTACTS
Another setting that was key to fine-tuning the details of that summit, and which could now be used to bring positions closer to the detained soldier, is the UN headquarters in New York.
Pyongyang has a permanent mission to the United Nations, something that US diplomacy can take advantage of to communicate with them directly or indirectly.
Be that as it may, the communication efforts have not yet been successful, at least officially. “All we can do is keep sending messages. Both publicly and through private channels,” said Deputy Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh.
Professor Lerner believes that North Korea has not yet “come out publicly because it likes to be assertive”, but suspects that there has already been or will soon be “some discreet communications”.
As for the future of the soldier, there are not many options on the table, according to the expert from Ohio University: surely he has been arrested and will be put on trial for entering the country illegally.
“If found guilty, he will go to prison for a while or be sent to the United States, where he will be tried by court martial. On the other hand, if he declares himself a follower of North Korea and its ideology, he will be used for propaganda purposes”, he concluded.
