Quixotic activists use balloons to nudge change in N Korea
SEOUL: Some send up plastic leaflets that weigh less than a feather and flutter down from the clouds with calls for democracy or blurry cartoons ridiculing North Korea’s ruler.
Some send flash drives loaded with South Korean soap operas, or mini-documentaries about the vast wealth of Southern corporations, or crisp new US dollar bills. One occasionally sends his empty food wrappers, stained labels showing noodles slathered in meat sauce, so Northerners can see the good life they’d find in the South.
They are self-proclaimed soldiers in a quiet war with North Korea, a disparate and colourful collection of activists taking on one of the world’s most isolated nations – mostly using home-made hot-air balloons.
To their critics in South Korea, they run quixotic and perhaps pointless campaigns. Some are scorned as little more than attention-hungry cranks who spend much of their time exchanging insults with others.
But the activists look across the border and see a country they believe they are already reshaping.
“The quickest way to bring down the regime is to change people’s minds,” said Park Sang Hak, a refugee from the North who now runs the group Fighters for a Free North Korea from a Seoul office, sending tens of thousands of plastic fliers across the border every year.
Much of what the activists send – satirical cartoons, or teary soap operas awash in lost loves, curses and amnesia – doesn’t look dangerous at all. But scholars and refugees say the outside information has helped bring a wealth of changes, from new slang to changing fashions to increasing demand for consumer goods in the expanding market economy.
While the activists often disagree about what should be sent into the North – some believe in snarky cartoons, others in documentaries, others in dry political leaflets laying out the lies of Pyongyang’s propaganda – all see themselves as warriors nudging along change.
“North Korea keeps control by blocking outside information,” said Lee Min Bok, a North Korean who was swayed to flee his homeland when he stumbled across earlier generations of leaflets 30 years ago. He has spent nearly 15 years sending leaflets into the North. “To destroy it peacefully, the influx of information is necessary.”
Pyongyang detests the activists, decrying outside influences as a “yellow wind”, even as it sends thousands of its own leaflets South every year.
“The influx of external information doesn’t shake the regime,” said Cheong SeongChang, an analyst at South Korea’s Sejong Institute. It may bring incremental change, by encouraging a few people to defect, for example, but he doubts it’ll do much more.
There are also risks to the balloon campaigns. North Koreans caught carrying political leaflets or flash drives could be severely punished, and the balloon launches could compromise cross-border diplomacy.
Still, every year the activists send hundreds of thousands of leaflets across the border, and thousands of DVDs and thumb drives loaded with everything from Bibles to American sitcoms to South Korean historical dramas.
But most are carried by home-made balloons thousands of metres above the belt of razor wire and minefields that separate the two Koreas. If the winds behave, the balloons, typically about 90cm wide and 7.6m long and made of thin translucent plastic, carry bundles of thousands of palm-sized leaflets. Simple timers open the bundles after a set number of hours, scattering the leaflets. – AP