Unifiction Ministry Reverts to Form

It’s official: the Unifiction Ministry should have been abolished after all:

The Ministry of Unification announced Wednesday that it would ask police to investigate anti-Pyongyang activist leaders if they press ahead with their plan to launch propaganda leaflets and North Korean banknotes across the border to the North.

A ministry official, along with a representative from police, met with organizers planning to launch the anti-North Korean leaflets, activists said. The two organizers who met the ministry official were Choi Sung-yong, of the Family Assembly Abducted to North Korea, and Park Sang-han, from the Fighters for Free North Korea, a group of North Korean defectors in Seoul.

During the meeting, the police official had reportedly said, “It looks like we will have to investigate this matter.” [Korea Times]

Thugs.

Some of the leaflets, which denounce North Korea’s totalitarian regime and predict its eventual fall, will include 5,000 North Korean-won banknotes the activists smuggled in. Organizers are hoping the currency will provide additional incentive for the regime’s citizens to pick them up. Each 5,000-won banknote will be enough to buy a couple of kilograms of rice in the regime, according to activists. [….]

But the ministry said this week it is unlawful to bring in and hold North Korean banknotes without explicit permission from the Seoul government.

According to South Korea’s “Law Regarding the Exchange and Cooperation of Inter-Korean Relations,” those who illegally bring in North Korean banknotes to the South may face a jail term of up to three years or fines of up of 10 million won.

No one is suggesting that the North Korean currency — unlike the stuff that the North itself is so fond of disseminating — is counterfeit. If you’ve lived in South Korea for any length of time, you’ve probably seen North Korean currency and postage stamps sold or displayed as souvenirs, so clearly, this prohibition hasn’t been enforced for years. It hasn’t been enforced because there is zero danger that North Korean currency could undermine the South Korean economy or political system. That’s especially so if it’s floated back into North Korea to help feed people who are being starved by a government that squanders their grocery money on missiles, nukes, and the bacchanalian lifestyles of a select few. But we already know that Lee’s government was already looking for dumb reasons to prosecute people for floating in South Korean or U.S. currency to the starving people in the North, so let’s just call it what it is: Lee acting as executor of Kim Jong Il’s censorship in the South.

I wonder what Lee really thinks he’s going to gain from this, besides creating a lot of free publicity for the activists. He’s not going to bully people who’ve stood up to a regime as totalitarian as North Korea’s, but he might alienate conservative South Koreans who agree with them. Lee isn’t going to placate the North Korea this way, either, unless he’s willing to resume the kind of massive, unconditional, regime-sustaining aid that he cut off after his inauguration.