(Seoul) By sending balloons to his homeland, North Korean defector Park Sang-hak intends to perpetuate a long tradition of psychological warfare between the two Koreas, in the hope of one day bringing down Kim Jong-un’s regime .
For almost twenty years, the fifty-year-old who fled North Korea in 1999 has been sending balloons filled with leaflets denouncing the Pyongyang regime, dollar banknotes, and even USB keys containing K- music. Southern pop.
His mission, he told AFP, is to “enlighten the North Korean population.”
The 56-year-old activist came into the spotlight recently when Pyongyang called him “scum” and responded by sending more than a thousand balloons filled with trash to the South. Some 300 additional balloons from the North disrupted air traffic in Seoul on Wednesday morning.
It is an “unacceptable” diversion of the rules of the game, criticizes Mr. Park, asserting that never, in the history of propaganda between the two Koreas, has either side sent garbage .
“Kim Jong-un is the first to order the sending of balloons of garbage,” denounces the defector, demanding an apology from the North Korean leader for this “despicable and atrocious” act.
The son of a North Korean double agent, Mr. Park himself came across a pamphlet from the South, while still living in the North, purporting to show the successful lives of two defectors.
He still remembers it well: “A photo shows one of the two with pretty South Korean women in swimsuits, and the text says he received 100 million won in government aid.”
This pamphlet changed his life, showing him that defection was not an option reserved for diplomats or soldiers based on the border, but was possible for anyone willing to attempt the river crossing to China .
“That was the most important information for me,” he says. Because with his mother, his brother and his sister, he decided a few years later to head south.
The leaflet was propaganda put out by the South Korean government, he later learned from the photographed defector. “He told me it was a set-up by the National Intelligence Service in Seoul,” he reports today.
On both sides of the Korean border, the use of propaganda was then commonplace. Seoul and Pyongyang broadcast their messages by loudspeaker, with the South even dedicating radio broadcasts to it.
Both sides ended their campaigns in 2003, during a period when relations between the two Koreas warmed, prompting Mr. Park to launch his own activities.
After initially using balloons purchased in a toy store – he sent the first in 2006 – the defector improved his method through trial and error.
Today, he claims to be able to send his fully wrapped balloons, weighing seven to eight kilos, “with his eyes closed” to the North, always containing a dollar bill, a key element, according to Mr. Park, of their success.
Because North Koreans, he explains, now know that bank notes fall from the sky, which encourages them to open and read the leaflets written by Mr. Park and his team. One of them details the assassination of Kim Jong-un’s half-brother at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in 2017, showing a photo of his body.
The liveliness of Pyongyang’s reaction attests to the impact of this activity on the North Korean public, Mr. Park said, stressing that the North’s 26 million inhabitants, deprived of the Internet and free media, only have very little information.
“I received calls from around 800 defectors who thanked me for my mission and told me that they had seen my leaflets in the North,” he says happily.
Critics say his actions risk worsening the situation between the two countries, which have remained technically at war since the inter-Korean conflict (1950-53) ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
But Mr. Park rejects such criticism: “While Kim keeps firing missiles, our message is to stop this violence.”
Its objective is to bring down the regime from within. “These leaflets will bring the truth to the North Korean people, who will use them to rise up against the Kim regime and overthrow it,” he hopes.
“My tracts,” he said, are tracts “of truth, money and love.”
