The usual caveats apply when it comes to news from North Korea due to the inability to confirm the rumors that come out of the place. With that said I can definitely imagine this execution happening considering the importance of isolating the population from outside information:
Authorities in North Korea executed the owner of a fishing fleet in front of 100 boat captains and fisheries executives for secretly listening to broadcasts by Radio Free Asia and other forbidden media outlets while at sea, sources in the country told RFA.
The fishing boat captain, who picked up the habit of tuning in to broadcasts from abroad while in the military, confessed to having listened to the U.S. government-funded media outlet for more than 15 years, after he was turned in by a resentful crewman at his base in the northeastern port city of Chongjin.
You can read more at the link, but has anyone in the media bothered to ask President Moon what he thinks about executing people for listening to the radio?
US diplomat Tom Malinowski has a good read in Politico that is long but worth reading which includes a number of ideas I have advocated for over the years:
Tom Malinowski
At my Senate confirmation hearing a few years ago, I made a promise to the panel deciding my fate: never to use the phrase “there are no good options.” After all, if there were obvious solutions to the hardest—and most interesting—problems we face in the world, they would already have been found. Our job in the U.S. government—I served in the State Department as an assistant secretary focused on human rights—was not to make excuses in such situations, but to use whatever inherently limited tools we had to try to make things better, and to avoid making them worse.
North Korea tests this proposition like nothing else. Since its latest provocative missile test, thoughtful observers have pointed out that neither sanctions nor diplomacy are likely to dissuade Kim Jong Un from deploying nuclear weapons that can reach the United States, that we cannot depend on China to stop him for us, but that the alternative of a military strike on North Korea could cause a war that would lay waste to our ally South Korea. When it comes to North Korea, the phrase “there are no good options” has become a mantra. [Politico]
Here is the part I have been advocating for, for many years, to aggressively fight the information war within North Korea:
Flood the zone with information: In the last year of the Obama administration, we increased our funding for getting information to North Koreans. But the State Department still allocates less then $3 million for this effort, and the Trump administration’s first budget request did not mention it. Congress should work with the administration to create a well-funded, dedicated program. The State Department should also continue efforts we began under Obama to enlist like-minded allies in Europe and Asia to back these efforts, and tech companies to find creative ways for North Koreans to share information safely. More funding should also go to scholarships for North Korean defectors, so that they will be ready to help their people if the North opens up.
Many North Korean defectors have said that they decision to defect was influenced by defector radio stations. Kang Chol-hwan who wrote the book Aquariums of Pyongyang is probably the most famous defector who said defector radio influenced his decision to leave North Korea.
The proliferation of USB and other media devices to bring in South Korean entertainment programming is another way the information war is being fought within North Korea.
Also as we have seen over the years nothing seems to infuriate the Kim regime more than the balloon launches from North Korean defectors. This fury is a sign that the anti-regime information smuggled into North Korea via these balloon launches is having an effect. The Kim regime even tried to assassinate the man behind the balloon launches to get them to stop.
Could you imagine what the regime’s reaction would be if cheap drones were developed that could beam down the Internet and television programming into North Korea? Imagine the resources the Kim regime would have to dedicate to combat this threat? That is why I think flooding the country with as much subversive information as possible will keep the regime on its heels and have to use many of its limited resources to combat it.
However the big question is if fighting the information war is enough to collapse the Kim regime? There is no silver bullet to ending the Kim family’s rule of North Korea which is why I think fighting the information war is not something that can singularly collapse the regime. It has to be part of a more comprehensive strategy which it seems no US administration has fully developed yet.
Here is an interesting Aritcle in East Asian Affairs about the online radio station, Free NK that was founded by North Korean defectors and now may have to stop their programming because of threats against them by South Koreans:
We’re not talking big time here. Free North Korea broadcasts live for just one hour each evening. And its start-up costs, a modest 30 million won (US$26,000), were financed wholly by other defectors; not South Koreans, much less the government in Seoul. Its seven-strong staff are realistic about their chances of being heard inside North Korea, where Internet access is all but non-existent. But even in megawired South Korea, they have only 3,000 members so far, with only a modest 10,000 logging onto the site.
So, for now Free NK remains a still small voice crying in the wilderness, seeking to lighten the enforced darkness imposed on North Koreans by their benighted leaders. Topics covered include news, literature, and even philosophy, as well as the often dramatic experiences of defectors. Bravo. More power to them. What person with an ounce of human decency could possibly not wish Free NK well?
Alas, these are not rhetorical questions. Fact is, many South Koreans are not sympathetic – and some are downright nasty. From day one, Free NK has been hassled and harassed – to the point where, after less than a month on the air, it now may have to close down: the building’s landlord can’t cope with the pressure, so he’s given Free NK notice to quit by the end of this month.
I have to wonder how many of these threats are coming from Pyongyang hired goons, but the article concludes with an interesting theory:
Even if the actual bullies are a minority, their violence – for that’s what it is – has been nourished in a noxious new soil that is spreading in Seoul these days. I fear I was wrong about democratization in South Korea. At least some of those who fought against dictatorship weren’t, and aren’t, true democrats. What they hated was the generals’ right-wing politics, not authoritarianism per se.
Such self-styled “progressives”, who rule the roost in the new South Korea, seem to me merely to have turned the old values inside out, rather than made true progress. I sometimes think Koreans don’t do shades of gray, but prefer gestalt conversions: a total switch of world view. They flip.
In the bad old days, woe betide you if you said anything good about North Korea in Seoul. Now it’s a mirror image: If you say anything bad about Kim Jong-il, you’re a traitor. Even if, like the defectors of Free NK, you’ve suffered grievously under the Dear Leader – and therefore know whereof you speak, unlike head-in-sand fellow-travellers living safely south of the border.
I never thought of it that way. Maybe today’s progressives really don’t mind authoritism along as they are the ones in charge.
