Memoirs of North founder trigger heated debate about censorship.

Critics question s. Korea law blocking access to north content

GoyanG: A South Korean publisher’s defiant move to release the memoirs of the North’s founder Kim Il-sung has triggered a heated debate over Seoul’s decades-old ban on Pyongyang’s propaganda under national security laws.

Critics of the measure say Southerners are politically mature enough to judge such material for themselves and argue that it amounts to unnecessary censorship in a vibrant democracy that is one of the most wired and educated countries in the world.

But the South remains officially at war with its nuclear-armed and impoverished neighbour, with legislation to match.

The national security law dates from 1948, before the outbreak of the Korean War, and still blocks ordinary citizens from accessing most North Korean-produced content, including its official Rodong Sinmun newspaper.

Reproducing or possessing banned pro-Pyongyang materials is punishable by up to seven years in prison.

Even so, publisher Kim Seungkyun last month released the North Korean founder’s eight-volume memoirs titled With the Century, saying he did so to promote inter-Korean reconciliation.

An anti-North civic group filed a criminal complaint, police launched a probe and within days the country’s major bookstores – who had received it via a publishers’ association – pulled it from their shelves.

It briefly remained available online for 280,000 won (RM1,023) for the full set, but by last week it was no longer available on popular web portal Naver, while searches on local bookselling platforms Kyobo and Yes24 showed no results.

The moves triggered a debate over censorship and whether people really needed to be protected from reading the words of Il-sung.

“South Koreans already have a high level of judgement,” said Ha Tae-keung, a lawmaker from the conservative People Power Party who was jailed under the national security law as a student activist.

“No one is going to be deceived by a fantasy-like memoir of Kim Il Sung anymore.

“We now need to actively guarantee freedom of expression.”

Il-sung, the grandfather of the North’s current leader Kim Jong-un, ruled the world’s most reclusive country for nearly five decades until his death in 1994, with a mixture of his own brand of Stalinism and an unabashed personality cult.

The memoir, first published by Pyongyang in 1992 and available in 20 languages, portrays him as a heroic Korean guerilla leader against Japanese colonial forces, often denying and downplaying his Chinese and Soviet connections.

Researchers describe it as largely a “work of fiction” with archival Soviet evidence disproving some of its key claims, but add that it has value regardless of historical inaccuracies.