Pyongyang's show trials

When Matthew Miller steps into the court room in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang on Sunday, September 14, it is very likely that he will still be unaware of the charges that he is being tried for.

Interviewed in a Pyongyang hotel by CNN in early September, the 24-year-old from Bakersfield, California said his situation was "very urgent" and appealed for help from the US authorities.

Arrested by North Korean immigration officials in April after ripping up his tourist visa and requesting asylum in the North, Miller told the TV crew that he was still unaware of the laws that he had broken.

Miller is one of three US nationals presently held in North Korea. American citizen Kenneth Bae was found guilty in April 2013 of "hostile acts against the republic" and "attempting to overthrow the government." Sentenced to 15 years hard labor in a camp on the outskirts of Pyongyang, 46-year-old Bae has been hospitalized for treatment for diabetes, high blood pressure and back pains. His family has appealed for his release.

Plea for release

Relatives of Jeffrey Fowle, 56, have also called on Pyongyang to free the Ohio-native, who was detained for leaving a Bible in the hotel where he had been staying. Fowle is awaiting trial and is similarly unaware of the exact charges he faces.

But analysts say the charges are little more than a power-play by the North Korean regime.

"The leadership there wants to hold talks with the US government and is willing to do anything to achieve that aim," Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor at Tokyo's Waseda University, told DW. "They want legitimacy and forcing the US to the discussion table gives them that, at least in their eyes," he added.

Senior US diplomats and even former US President Jimmy Carter have made humanitarian trips to Pyongyang in the past to secure the freedom of US detainees, with Shigemura claiming that North Korea demands a payment before negotiations on the release of the prisoners can begin.

"They follow the same pattern," the professor said. "They make these delegations stay in Pyongyang a long time and rack up large bills, and ask them for money to free the prisoners."

Domestic propaganda

The talks, as well as the eventual release of the US citizen, are used as domestic propaganda by the regime, Shigemura added, to demonstrate that North Korea forced its powerful enemy to give in to its demands.

The conditions that the three US nationals are enduring in detention in the North are not clear, but the experiences of Robert Park in the 43 days after he was arrested on December 25, 2009, offer a glimpse of life inside Pyongyang's prisons.

"It's difficult for me to speak about what took place in North Korea because there was verifiable abuse and I was irreparably harmed by the regime," Park told DW.

"It is in fact now virtually impossible for me to speak about it as a matter of survival, having been diagnosed with severe post traumatic stress after multiple extended hospitalizations, and four years after the matter I am still in a very real battle to recover."

A human rights activist and founder of the Worldwide Coalition to Stop Genocide in North Korea, Park had already publicly protested against crimes against humanity in the North. To highlight the abuses, he walked across the frozen Tumen River from China carrying a Bible and a letter addressed to then-leader Kim Jong Il demanding that the dictator closed the North's labor camps and freed the estimated 200,000 inmates.

Regime 'off-guard'

"I took the regime completely off-guard and entered a region of North Korea never visited by tourists or foreigners," Park said. "My action was a legitimate response to a mass atrocity situation - a genocide - which, according to international laws and norms, deserves our urgent and immediate intervention."

Park claims he was physically and sexually abused while detained in the North. The abuse was so serious he has twice attempted suicide after his release and was hospitalized at a psychiatric facility in California. He has also prepared a case in a US court against North Korea under the Torture Victims Protection Act.

Bae, Miller and Fowle may not have entered the North with the intention of being arrested, but Park believes Kim Jong Un's government will do all it can to make Washington pay for their release.

"I suspect that the regime is determined to use all three persons as a buffer against mounting pressure vis-à-vis the United Nations' Commission of Inquiry report into human rights in the North and will milk all three cases for everything they are worth, including their propaganda value."

'Not politically motivated'

An unofficial spokesman for the North Korean government denied, however, that the trials are "politically motivated."

"These are simply trials for people who have broken North Korean laws," Kim Myong-chol, executive director of the Center for North Korea-US Peace - a mouthpiece for the regime in Pyongyang, told DW.

"The US might choose to see them as political, but that is not the case," he added. "If they are found guilty then they will serve their time in a prison, but it is possible that if a senior US official goes to Pyongyang and requests their release, then that might happen."