The Yoon administration has decided to crackdown on Park Sang-hak and his Fighters for a Free North Korea:
South Korean activists say they clashed with police while launching balloons carrying anti-Pyongyang propaganda materials across the North Korean border, ignoring their government’s plea to stop such activities since the North has threatened to respond with “deadly” retaliation.
Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector-turned-activist, said he his group had launched about eight balloons from an area in the South Korean border town of Paju Saturday night when police officers arrived at the scene and prevented them from sending their 12 remaining balloons. Park said police confiscated some of their materials and detained him and three other members of his group over mild scuffles with officers before releasing them after questioning.
Officials at the Paju police and the northern Gyeonggi provincial police agencies didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday.
The balloons flown toward North Korea carried masks, Tylenol and Vitamin C tablets along with propaganda materials, including booklets praising South Korea’s economic wealth and democratic society and hundreds of USB sticks containing videos of U.S. Congress members denouncing the North’s human rights record, Park said.
Associated Press
You can read more at the link.
Park Sang-hak is taking advantage of the change in government in South Korea to ramp up his balloon launch activities again after being largely silenced by the previous Moon administration:
An activist said he has again flown huge balloons carrying COVID-19 relief items and an anti-North Korea placard across the tense inter-Korean border, despite the North’s recent warning of a deadly attack over his activities.
Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector-turned-activist, said the 20 balloons launched from a South Korean border town on Sunday carried 20,000 masks and tens of thousands of Tylenol and Vitamin C tablets.
He said one of the balloons carried a placard with a message that reads “Let’s eradicate Kim Jong Un and (his sister) Kim Yo Jong,” along with their photos. He said no other propaganda statements were carried by the balloons.
For years, Park has floated helium-filled balloons with numerous, small anti-Pyongyang leaflets with harsh criticism of the Kim family’s authoritarian rule in North Korea. But he’s recently changed his cargo to masks and other health products amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Stars & Stripes
You can read more at the link.
No surprise here that the ruling Democratic Party gave in to orders from Kim Yo-jong to criminalize the activists sending leaflets into North Korea:
The ruling Democratic Party of Korea’s (DPK) passage of a bill at the national Assembly prohibiting the sending of leaflets with anti-North Korea messages across the border is facing a strong backlash from defectors’ groups and the opposition as well as the international community.
Korea Times
Park Sang-hak, the head of the Fighters for a Free North Korea, a North Korean defectors’ group, said Tuesday that he will file a petition with the Constitutional Court against the so-called “anti-leaflet law,” which can hand down a prison term of three years or a maximum fine of 30 million won to people sending messages critical of the North Korean regime via leaflets or broadcasts.
The DPK pushed ahead with passing the bill despite a protest from the conservative opposition People Power Party late Monday evening. The bill came after a statement from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong in June in which she strongly denounced such leaflets and called on Seoul to do something about them. The opposition and activists for North Korean human rights such as Park have derided it as legislation “submitting to Kim Yo-jong’s order.”
You can read more at the link, but the article speculates that this might impact relations with the incoming Biden administration. I would be surprised if it does because when did anyone in the Obama administration ever strongly support these activists? I doubt the Biden administration will be much different.
By the way the North Korean reaction and the South Korean left’s quick criminalization of Park Sang-hak and his group is a sure sign that the leaflets are having an effect in North Korea.
ROK Drop favorite Professor B.R. Myers has a new article posted about the intense propaganda campaign launched by the Korean left to first impeach President Park and now is currently being used to cover up for ruling party scandals and setting conditions for implementation of the Korean confederation:
Druking, Burning Sun, Mokpo real estate, SillaJen, the Ulsan mayoral race, Pak Won-soon, Optimus, Yun Mi-hyang, Lime, Cho Kuk — Justice Minister Cho Kuk: More interesting than any of the recent scandals these keywords stand for has been the nationalist left’s unyielding defense of the pols and officials involved. We even saw self-described feminists jeer the frightened woman who had complained of the Seoul mayor’s sexual advances. Whistle-blowers and investigators are denounced as “pro-Japanese” elements working for the opposition, which is in fact the most docile and insignificant one this country has seen since the early 1980s.
The temptation now, to which my conservative acquaintances have succumbed with a certain relief, is to write off the ruling camp as a network of insider traders and real-estate speculators: old-school pols who rig elections, demote prosecutors, and imprison journalists for no other reason than to keep outsiders from the trough. But corruption and conviction are not the antitheses they are made out to be. One can hardly expect people who question the very legitimacy of the South Korean state to fret overmuch about breaking its laws. This is not to imply that the parliamentary right is more honest.
Granted, the cascade of scandals has given the lie to the ruling camp’s vaunted commitment to reform. The general non-response, meanwhile, has belied the public’s commitment to it, something the foreign press corps — “big-mouthed and clueless,” to borrow what Peter Handke once said of the Spiegel — took at face value in 2016. None of the alleged misconduct, which uncannily replicates or amplifies that for which Park and her people were convicted, has aroused much indignation from the man in the street. Even considering that voters are more tolerant of abuses of power when public expenditures are rising sharply (Melo and Pereira, 2015), as they have been here since 2017, we must acknowledge that the so-called Candlelight Revolution was a more top-down affair than we were led to believe.
This should have been obvious to us from the demonstrators’ struggle to give coherent reasons for their festive-seeming “outrage” on the nightly news. They weren’t really mad as hell, but they believed they should be, thanks to an intense propaganda campaign orchestrated by the politico-media complex.
B.R. Myers
I highly recommend reading the whole thing at the link. Professor Myers goes on to talk about the propaganda efforts going on now to describe the Korean left’s Confederation idea as being like the European Union. The propaganda effort is also trying to bury historical memory of North Korea in order to set Clinton era like conditions for a deal to be struck with the U.S. All this is going on with little notice or care from the media or the so called North Korea policy experts who Myers is most critical of in his article.
I remember the good old days of North Korean propaganda music on the DMZ and U.S. troops station at the JSA may get to experience it again:
North Korea is reinstalling propaganda loudspeakers in regions along the inter-Korean border after removing them under a 2018 summit agreement with South Korea, military officials said Monday.
After the summit between President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on April 27, 2018, the two Koreas agreed to halt all hostile acts against each other and eliminate their means, including broadcasting through loudspeakers and distribution of leaflets.
According to the authorities, North Korea has been detected setting up loudspeakers again “in multiple places” inside the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) from around Sunday. It had dismantled dozens of loudspeakers in around 40 areas near the tense border in a first action to follow up on the Panmunjom Declaration.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
