N. Korea's fear of external info grows after Seoul allows sending propaganda leaflets
Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector-turned-activist and founder of the advocacy group Fighters for a Free North Korea, holds up propaganda material condemning North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for developing nuclear weapons and missiles without feeding the country's hungry residents in this April 2021 photo. Courtesy of Fighters for a Free North Korea
By Kang Hyun-kyungPyongyang has belatedly reacted furiously to South Korean Constitutional Court’s decision in September to strike down the ban on sending propaganda leaflets over the border into North Korea.
In a statement released in November, North Korea’s Central News Agency (KCNA) said the court’s decision signals a de facto war against the North as information warfare is part of an operation preceding a ground war.
Calling North Korean defectors who flew the leaflets across the border “garbage,” the KCNA said that North Korea’s firing of anti-aircraft rounds across the border in 2014 and its destroying of the inter-Korean liason office used for talks between the two countries in 2020 are two chilling reminders of what South Korea could face.
In 2014, North Korea used anti-aircraft guns to shoot down balloons carrying anti-Pyongyang leaflets flown by South Korean activists near the border town of Yeoncheon.
North Korea’s furious reaction to the court’s lifting of the ban on sending propaganda leaflets into the North reflects the regime fears its people being exposed to outside information.
Sean King, senior vice president at Park Strategies
Sean King, senior vice president of the New York-based consulting firm Park Strategies, said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is afraid of his people learning the truth that they live under the control of a repressive regime.
“From what I know, authoritarian North Korea fears any challenge from within to its own version of events and of the world,” he told The Korea Times in an email message. “It cannot afford to let its own people know what’s actually going on outside lest they begin to question the regime as to the many lies they’re told and the burdens they must endure.”
The Constitutional Court of South Korea ruled on Sept. 26 that a clause in the Development of Inter-Korean Relations Act, which prohibited the distribution of anti-North Korea leaflets, limited freedom of speech. The law was nullified immediately in the wake of the ruling.
The law was introduced in 2018 when liberal President Moon Jae-in was in power. A group of lawmakers from the then ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) pushed through the legislation, despite opposition from the conservative People Power Party (PPP). People violating the law faced up to three years in prison or a 30 million won ($22,000) fine.
The law drew a lot of criticism both at home and abroad as it excessively repressed freedom of speech. PPP lawmakers called it a law designed to curry favor with the North Korean leader’s sister Kim Yo-jong because the DPK pushed for the legislation after she lashed out at South Korea for allowing North Korean defectors to send the leaflets.
King said “a wealthier, happier and larger South Korea represents an existential threat to the Kim regime.
“It thus serves Kim Jong-un’s interests that his citizens are left in the dark,” he said.
Information about the outside world, particularly free and democratic nations, is a threat to autocratic states, he said.
According to him, East Germany, before German reunification, was more exposed to West Germany and the outside world and East Germans were “global communists who happened to be Germans.”
“East Germans’ exposure to West German media and travel to other socialist countries at least, led them to doubt and challenge what their own unelected government was telling them,” King said. “For example, for those roughly 70 percent of East Germans who could watch West German television, they knew their leaders weren’t telling them the whole truth about the 1981 Solidarity movement in Poland and the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in what was then the Soviet Union (which is today’s Ukraine).”