In the strange case of Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins, four seemingly obscure people have been caught up in diplomatic maneuvering among the US, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, China and Indonesia.
The issue: the US Army wants to arrest Jenkins on charges of desertion and aiding the enemy -- among the most serious of military crimes -- to keep faith with the hundreds of thousands of American men and women who have served honorably over the past 40 years and to preserve good order and discipline.
In contrast, the Japanese government and a wide segment of the Japanese public want to see an aging and ailing Jenkins reunited permanently with his wife, a Japanese citizen, and their two daughters, and allowed to live out his life peacefully.
Jenkins's nieces and nephews in North Carolina, who have heard little from him for 40 years, assert on the Internet (www.charlesrobert jen-kins.org) that Jenkins is a prisoner of war who has been abandoned.
"We believe that the US Army deserted my uncle," says an entry on the Web site.
And, from all appearances, North Korea, South Korea, China and Indonesia want the issue quietly to go away and not interfere with larger issues, notably negotiations intended to defuse North Korea's aspirations to acquire nuclear arms.
This convoluted tale begins in South Korea in 1965 when Jenkins disappeared while on a patrol in the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea. Shortly after, he turned up in Pyongyang.
In 1978, North Korean agents kidnapped Hitomi Soga and her mother near their home in Japan and took her to Pyongyang. There Soga, now 45, met Jenkins and married him in 1980. They produced two daughters.
Not much was heard from them until Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited North Korea in 2002 and brought back Soga and four other kidnapped Japanese. Since then, Soga has been pleading with Japan, the US and North Korea to allow her husband and daughters to join her.
The family was reunited in Jakarta on July 9.
The question is whether the US will take custody of Jenkins under the Status of Forces Agreement, which sets the conditions under which US troops are stationed in Japan. It applies to Jenkins because desertion has no statute of limitations and he is considered to be still under military jurisdiction.
Besides desertion and aiding the enemy, both of which could be punished by death, Jenkins has been charged with urging two other soldiers to desert and with two instances of encouraging disloyalty.
Jenkins's family in North Carolina have asked that the charges be dropped. In a letter to US President George W. Bush, Susan Cutting, a niece, wrote: "It is very hard to believe in our system of government when men like [former US president] Richard Nixon get pardoned for their crimes and men like [former US president] Bill Clinton commit perjury and do not get [removed from office].
"Vietnam War deserters and draft dodgers got pardons and I believe my uncle should also," Cutting said.
"He is an old man; much older from the pictures than his 62 years. If, in fact, he is a deserter and defector, I believe he has paid enough for his crimes," she said.
After Bush met Koizumi in Georgia last month, an administration official said the president expressed "an understanding of why the Japanese public and why the prime minister want to do everything they can to help find a humanitarian answer to this real puzzle." Bush also noted that the charges against Jenkins are serious.
Supporters of Jenkins have urged that he be given the chance to tell his story. The best place to hear that would be a court martial, with its demands for evidence and the right to cross-examination. Jenkins would be considered innocent until proven guilty and the burden of proof would be on the government.
Knowledgeable military officers have suggested that Jenkins could be offered an administrative hearing before a senior officer that could end in something like a dishonorable discharge but no jail time.
Army authorities also want to question Jenkins about other Americans thought to be deserters in North Korea and to glean intelligence from him.
What other American has spent the last 40 years in North Korea?
Richard Halloran is a journalist based in Hawaii.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS