28 January 2010

A South Korean lawyer sits down to dinner with a group of North Korean defectors and has an epiphany: “Listening to such painful stories, I naively wondered why the rest of the world is not doing more to help these desperate people. They are not some criminals or fugitives. Their only crime was to be born into a nation which is ruled by a dictatorship that cares more about the survival of its regime than the wellbeing of its people.”

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This sounds like a big step forward: Radio Free North Korea will begin interviewing North Koreans inside North Korea about their lives, and then broadcast those interviews back into North Korea from Seoul:

Kim Seong-min, a representative of the Seoul-based Free North Korea Radio and also a defector, said Wednesday that the station will air the program, titled “Voice of People,” twice a day between Friday and Saturday. The seven-minute insert will contain six people’s descriptions on the recent currency revaluation, a crackdown on marketeering and other complaints, he said. [….]

“This will be the first program recorded by North Koreans who are currently residing in the North,” he said. “In order to deliver the lively voices of North Korean people, we will continue to broadcast this kind program once a week.”

The North Korean Freedom Coalition supports Free North Korea Radio, along with leaflet balloon launches into the North.

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Howls of protest from the Hanky as Lee Myung Bak withdraws government support for “independent” Korean films. I’m not enough of a film critic to say what artistic merit might be lost here, but I’m optimistic enough to think that good art can find a market. On the other hand, South Korea’s state-supported film industry often seemed to have no higher purpose than winning the Kim Il Sung Prize for anti-American propaganda.
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This is why you read the Hankyoreh at your own peril:

Regarding North Korea’s intentions, experts are primarily interpreting the move as a low-intensity “North Korean-style” pressure tactic in response to the “speed modulation” and “neglect tactics” of the Lee administration’s North Korea policy. Since the second half of 2009, North Korea has waged an active “dialogue offensive” toward South Korea, but the Lee administration has responded reluctantly to the idea of inter-Korean dialogue, either linking it strongly with the North Korea nuclear issue or attaching difficult conditions.

See? They really just want to be loved.

Read this story for yourself and just see how it goes on, for paragraph after paragraph, citing no hard facts or sources, relying exclusively on “experts” or “analysts” who could be drunks in a soju tent for all we know. So it typically tends to be with the Hanky. If any “expert” is named, invariably, he’ll be affiliated with the “Hankyoreh Peace Institute,” which I suppose might not be the Hanky’s own kept think-tank, though it’s certainly a reliable fount of views acceptable to the Central Committee. (Of course, some things are impossible to mitigate or explain, even for the Hankyoreh, in which case, it just ignores them.)

Just consider the contrast here: somewhere in China or North Korea right now, reporters and sources for the Daily NK, Open News, and Radio Free North Korea are risking their lives to bring us more relevant facts — facts that are damning to the Hanky’s pro-Kim Jong Il views. Meanwhile, the Hanky is running a shell game to obscure the facts, laundering its opinions through politically reliable, anonymous, or perhaps completely fictitious “experts,” and then passing the views of those “analysts” off as news.

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Because it worked so well last time: an unnamed American think tank, presumably the awful Korea Society, wants to invite a North Korean orchestra to the United States. The idea isn’t inherently harmful, though you can count on some American booster of the visit to say something stupid in its defense.