S. Korea faces dilemma over anti-North leaflets
SEOUL: Days after a historic interKorean summit, Lee Min-bok, a defector who has been flying antiPyongyang leaflets into the North for 15 years, received a call from an official at Seoul’s Unification Ministry urging him to halt his balloon campaign.
It was a plea by South Korea not to jeopardise the recent thaw engineered by the leaders of the two Koreas, who agreed during last week’s summit to cease all hostile acts along the border – including the distribution of leaflets – from May 1.
On Saturday, police prevented a planned release of balloons by a defector group after a confrontation with anti-leaflet protesters.
For Lee, the campaign is personal. He said reading such leaflets as a young man in the North brought about an “awakening moment” in 1990 that helped him realise how oppressive and destitute his homeland was at a time when the South was emerging as an economic powerhouse.
In 1995, he escaped to South Korea.
“I really believed that Kim Il-sung was the centre of the world and he was making everything right and great for us,” Lee said, referring to North Korea’s founding father, the grandfather of current leader Kim Jong-un.
“Realising what I had learned, heard and read were all lies, I decid- ed to defect to the South to live with the truth.”
Lee, who launched his first batch of balloons in 2003 and has since dispatched more than 300 million, runs one of several defector-led civic groups that regularly send leaflets across the border carrying messages critical of Kim and human rights abuses in North Korea.
Their campaign now poses a thorny dilemma for Seoul, which is striving to keep up the momentum for inter-Korean reconciliation after a decade of confrontation amid the North’s growing nuclear weapons and missile programmes.
Pyongyang has in the past blamed Seoul for failing to stop previous leaflet launches, calling them ”an act of war”.
The two Koreas even traded fire in 2014 after the North’s military shot machine guns at balloons launched by defector activists.
In the call from the Unification Ministry, the official repeatedly pleaded for an end to balloon launches, promising support if his group switched to other activities aimed at improving human rights in North Korea, according to Lee.
The ministry was not available for comment, but on Friday it issued a statement urging civic groups to halt leaflet launches, which it said would violate the spirit of the agreement made at the summit and heighten military tensions and safety concerns.