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“Liberal” South Korean government blocks filming of Thae Yong-ho’s speech; article reporting it vanishes (Updated)

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices … in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hold and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

– George Orwell, 1984

Last Friday, the South Korean cable TV network Channel A, a subsidiary of the widely circulated Dong-A Ilbo newspaper, sent a reporter and a camera crew to a small human rights conference in the Bangbae-dong neighborhood in Seoul. Bangbae is a district south of the Han River, between the world-famous Kangnam district and Yeoido, where the National Assembly meets. Thae Yong-ho, North Korea’s former Deputy Ambassador to the U.K. and the highest-ranking living North Korean defector, was scheduled to speak there. The images that follow are screenshots from Channel A’s video report on that event.

Thae arrived with a substantial security presence, which Channel A and I presume to have been from Korea’s National Intelligence Service. This much is well-justified. North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau has been implicated in multiple attempts to assassinate high-ranking, outspoken defectors, including the octogenarian Hwang Jang-yop (who has since passed) and the fiercely charismatic Park Sang-hak (best known for launching leaflet balloons across the DMZ).

Thae’s testimony electrified the audience at the House Foreign Affairs Committee last year. During that visit, a friendly-yet-professional U.S. security detail kept a close watch on him. What’s important here is that the security guys knew that their job was to protect Thae’s right and ability to speak freely on matters of the very highest public interest.

But that’s not what happened when Thae arrived at the conference in Bangbae. Channel A’s video of the conference shows that when Thae got up to speak, the NIS boys also got up and blocked Channel A from filming. When Channel A’s reporter asks why, the NIS guy asks him to step outside and talk.

After the speech ends, as the NIS guys are hustling Thae into a black SUV, the reporter asks him, in effect, what cards he expects the North Koreans will play at the summit. Thae starts to answer, saying that he thinks Pyongyang may well promise to denuclearize again because of the high pressure it’s under, but the NIS men prevent him from finishing his answer. At another point, Thae predicts that despite its promise to denuclearize, Pyongyang will try to stall two or three years until Trump is out of office, presumably to frustrate verification.

Organizers of the event also told Channel A that the NIS had asked them not to focus on “sensitive” matters like the summit. In case you’re wondering at this point, Article 21 of the Republic of Korea Constitution says, “All citizens shall enjoy freedom of speech and the press, and freedom of assembly and association,” and explicitly prohibits the licensing or censorship of speech. It contains no “unless it’s ‘sensitive’” exception, although there is a defamation exception.

I can’t help wondering what Thae, an intelligent and articulate man who defected so that could live and speak freely, must be thinking when things like this happen in a country that calls itself a liberal democracy. I expect to see scenes like this in China, not South Korea.

You can see video of the whole thing here – at least, you could have, except that by Sunday, this was all that remained of Channel A’s report, at least at that link.

That’s … curious. Hey, maybe the article just moved to a new URL. If you can find it, the comments are open below. Now, in the interest of balance, over the weekend, I also viewed this BBC report on North Korea’s slave labor racket in Europe. It features clips of an interview with Thae. If the interview is recent, it suggests something less than a complete media blackout on him, at least for now.

I don’t know when this video was taken, what conditions were imposed on Thae’s availability, or whether the same restrictions are being applied to foreign and Korean reporters who contact Thae.

I’ve hypothesized that Pyongyang seeks to gradually charm, extort, and finlandize South Korea into submission, starting by censoring its critics in the South. I’ve also hypothesized that it would try to do this with some degree of collaboration of a like-minded South Korean government. If journalists are interested in the protection of free speech and a free press in South Korea as a general matter, and more specifically, in whether this kooky conspiracy theory of mine is finding yet more grim validation as South Korea nears a round of National Assembly elections, then perhaps they should interview Thae, the organizers of the event in Bangbae, and Channel A’s reporting team.

In the interests of defeating what I at least suspect to be political censorship, and in giving policymakers and the public in America and elsewhere an insight into what’s happening in South Korea, I’m retrieving Channel A’s Korean-language report from the memory hole and posting a pdf of it below. This is something I typically won’t do in the interests of “fair use.” If Channel A objects, I’ll gladly take the pdf down.

Thae Yong-ho censorship á„ᅢ영호 “北 핵포기 안 á„’á…¢”…국정원, 취재 á„ᅩᆼ제 _ 네이버 뉴스

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Update: A reader claims to have been present at the event and confirms Channel A’s account.

Dutch human rights activist Remco Breuker also tells us about the timing of the BBC clips. As it turns out, they predated North Korea’s charm offensive … and the silencing of Thae. So that explains that.

I can’t say whether this is being directed by Pyongyang or whether this is preemptive proxy censorship by Comrade Im and other extremists in the Blue House, but it seems to confirm suspicions that Thae has been muzzled. This just looks bad. It’s also a test for us. When a tyranny censors a democracy–as Pyongyang has repeatedly demanded of Seoul–it’s a case of an inferior political system demanding regime change by a superior one. Free speech and a free press are a democracy’s first lines of defense against tyranny. There is only one appropriate response when North Korea objects to critical speech in the U.S., South Korea, or anywhere else: “We can do that here. Now fuck off.”