SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol pledged in a major policy address Thursday to significantly expand the government’s information campaign aimed at North Korean citizens.
South Korean presidents customarily use the Aug. 15 Independence Day speech to offer incentives for North Korean cooperation. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has already rejected an “audacious plan” of the Yoon regime. On Thursday, Mr. Yoon suggested the establishment of a joint working group.
What attracted the most attention, however, was his vow to initiate a government-run information campaign aimed at North Koreans.
“The freedom we enjoy must be extended to the ‘frozen kingdom’ of the North,” he told South Koreans, promising to “help awaken the people of North Korea to the value of freedom.”
North Koreans lack the rights to free expression, free movement, free worship or free information.
“We need to change the minds of the North Korean people to make them ardently desire a freedom-based unification,” Mr. Yoon said.
Citing testimony from North Korean defectors, he said it was clear that South Korean broadcasts “made them aware of the false propaganda and instigations emanating from the North Korean regime.”
The Kim government has established ruthless border controls, policed online content and gone to other extremes to prevent outside information from reaching its citizens.
Though North Korea jams signals from the South and North Korean TV and radio dials are preprogrammed to Northern channels, South Korea broadcasts propaganda and K-pop music hits over the tense DMZ via giant banks of mobile speakers.
The range of those broadcasts is necessarily limited. Mr. Yoon said South Korea must do more to reach a larger audience.
“If more North Koreans come to recognize that unification through freedom is the only way to improve their lives … they will become strong, friendly forces for a freedom-based unification.”
He vowed to open a range of channels.
“We will expand the ‘right of access to information’ so that North Koreans will be able to use various channels to secure a variety of outside information,” he said.
Reaching the ‘frozen kingdom’
Sending messages over the border will prove challenging. Few ordinary North Koreans are connected to the internet. Instead, smartphone and computer users surf a closed regime-run intranet using locally developed apps.
South Korea and the BBC broadcast via radio to North Korea, but the number of listeners receiving the signals is unknown. All the North’s radios and TVs have dials set to strictly approved stations and channels.
Private groups monitoring human rights in North Korea say that smugglers distributing forbidden South Korean content — films, TV shows, music — face the death penalty. Visiting Christian activists have been incarcerated simply for leaving Bibles in hotel rooms.
Some reports suggest that citizens can be punished for using South Korean slang terms, which they pick up from secretly watching popular South Korean entertainment on smuggled thumb drives, CDs or DVDs.
Authorities have shut down electricity in targeted areas before raids, enabling police to confiscate such media jammed in powerless devices.
Pyongyang has reacted with unexpected fury to the small numbers of nongovernmental activists in the South who send balloons loaded with leaflets and other information into the North. That information includes broadsides against Mr. Kim, news reports and pop culture content on thumb drives.
Sometimes, U.S. dollars are attached to entice North Koreans to examine the cargo inside.
The Kim regime has retaliated against the flights with rhetorical blasts from high-level officials. It escalated the dispute earlier this year by flying balloons laden with trash into the South.
Seoul gets into the game
Individuals and civic groups, not the government in Seoul, have deployed the most information dissemination activities to North Korea.
It would be virtually unprecedented for the South Korean government to initiate an information campaign beyond the familiar military loudspeaker broadcasts across the DMZ.
“Liberal governments [in Seoul] have discouraged all these efforts by the civilian sector,” said Kim Jeong-ro, of the NGO Council for Diplomacy on Korean Unification. “If the [Yoon] government encourages them by providing funds, there are many things that can be done. But this will create danger.”
Mr. Yoon has proved he is not afraid to take risks or break with past practice.
He has courted massive voter displeasure by seeking to improve long-fraught ties with Japan. Many in South Korea’s academic, media and NGO communities are strongly opposed because of Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule.
He has also faced down the medical community by demanding that South Korea, which has fewer trained doctors than many other countries in the developed world, expand its annual quota of medical students. Junior doctors have been striking against the policy since February, but Mr. Yoon has not budged.
Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based international relations expert with Troy University who teaches the U.S. military in the Indo-Pacific, said South Korea has a full menu of potential tactics against the North, given the rising significance of cognitive warfare techniques.
“The guys who work on [psychological operations] in the National Intelligence Service and military are talking all kinds of things they can do,” he said. “But they have not deployed [them] due to the countermeasures they could face.”
Getting the technology right presents a first major hurdle, he said.
“Can they crack their smartphones and intranet?” he asked. “If you can get into that and find their sweet spot, there are all kinds of things you can do.”
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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