SEOUL AND WASHINGTON — North Korea's sentencing of two American TV journalists to 12 years of hard labor Monday could imperil the Obama administration's already difficult goal of curtailing the authoritarian nation's nuclear weapons ambitions.
If no deal is reached, the two women face a grim future in a brutal prison system notorious for its lack of adequate food and medical supplies and its high death rate.
Laura Ling and Euna Lee, reporters for San Francisco-based Current TV, were convicted by the nation's top Central Court of an unspecified "grave crime" against the hard-line regime after they were arrested in March along the Chinese-North Korean border while reporting a story on human trafficking.
In a terse statement Monday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency did not say where the women are to serve the time. North Koreans who receive similar sentences of "reform through labor" often face starvation and torture in a penal system many consider among the world's most repressive, said David Hawk, author of the 2004 study "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps."
Amid an international outcry over the sentences, the White House said Monday that it was "engaged through all possible channels" in seeking the release of Ling, 32, and Lee, 36.
A top U.S. goal is to prevent the effort from being linked to the larger dispute over North Korea's nuclear weapons program. But the outcome of that effort is anything but certain, experts said.
"I think it very unlikely that the North Koreans would let them go without some serious extortion," said L. Gordon Flake, a Korea expert and president of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation, a Washington think tank. "But giving in to that extortion would fundamentally undermine broader U.S. national security interests."
The question of linkage may be the most important to the fate of the women. U.S. officials fear that the North Koreans may attempt to make any reduction in the journalists' sentences dependent on what kind of punishment is imposed by the United Nations or by individual countries in response to Pyongyang's recent nuclear detonation and missile tests.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that while the administration was "deeply concerned" about the length of the sentences, America's differences with North Korea over Pyongyang's arms program are "separate and apart from what's happening to the two journalists."
