SEOUL, South Korea – South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol pledged to pursue a significant expansion of the government’s information campaign aimed at North Korean citizens in a major policy address Thursday.
South Korean presidents customarily used the August 15 Independence Day speech to offer incentives to North Korea to work together. Mr. Yoon has already done that, mentioning an “audacious plan” that the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un already rejected. On Thursday, he suggested the establishment of a joint working group.
But it was his vow to initiate a government-run information campaign aimed at North Koreans that attracted the most attention here.
“The freedom we enjoy must be extended to the ‘frozen kingdom’ of the North,” he told the South Korean nation, vowing 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 gone to extreme lengths to surround its citizens with a dike against outside information — from ruthless border controls to policing online content.
Though North Korea jams signals from the South, and North Korean TVs and radio dials are pre-programmed to Northern channels, South Korea does broadcast 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 more must be done to reach a larger audience of North Koreans.
“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’
Getting the word out over the border will prove a challenge: Very 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 even the BBC broadcast via radio to North Korea, but it is unknown how many listeners can receive the signals: All the country’s radios and TVs come with dials already 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 citizens can even be punished for using South Korean slang terms, which they may have picked up from secretly watching South Korean popular entertainment on smuggled thumb drives, CDs or DVDs.
The latter are losing popularity. In crackdowns, authorities have shut down electricity in targeted areas before raids, enabling police to confiscate media jammed in powerless devices.
Pyongyang has reacted with unexpected fury to the small numbers of non-governmental activists in the South who send balloons loaded with leaflets and other information into the North. That information includes anti-Kim propaganda broadsides, 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. Earlier this year, it escalated the dispute by sending counterflights of its 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 at North Korea.
For a South Korean government to initiate an information campaign — beyond the familiar military loudspeaker broadcasts across the DMZ — would be virtually unprecedented.
“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 Reunification. “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 proven 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 NGOs communities are strongly anti-Japan, based on the latter’s 1910-1945 colonial rule.
He has also faced down the medical community, demanding that South Korea — which has fewer trained doctors than many countries in the developed world — expand its annual quota of medical students. Junior doctors have been striking against the policy since February, but so far, Mr. Yoon has not budged.
Regarding North Korea, Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based international relations expert with Troy University who teaches the U.S. military in the Indo-Pacific, said a full menu of potential tactics exists, given the rising significance of cognitive warfare techniques in recent years.
“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.”
Just getting the technology right presents a first major hurdle, he added.
“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.