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North Korean Freedom Week is the next test for free speech in “free” Korea

A FEW OF US WILL ALWAYS STUBBORNLY INSIST THAT WE DISREGARD THE LIVES AND DIGNITY of North Korea’s oppressed people at our own peril. We argue that there can be no verified disarmament of a North Korea that remains a closed society, no security in its promises as long as it mendaciously denies the existence of its prison camps, no lasting peace as long as it holds human life in contempt, no reunification between a liberal democracy and a tyranny that holds free speech and thought in contempt, and no coexistence with a regime that would impose its own regime change on us and our allies by waging a borderless war of censorship against our freedom of expression.

For fifteen years, the North Korean Freedom Coalition has banded together those of us who make these arguments, across oceans, to commemorate North Korea Freedom Week. The Coalition alternates between holding its events in Washington and South Korea, which is this year’s venue. The week’s events often pass with too little notice from journalists who see human rights as an obstacle along the facile path to a false peace that Pyongyang tempts us to follow. But this year, North Korean Freedom Week will be news — or would be, if journalists valued freedom of expression as much as they sometimes pretend to.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. [Universal Declaration of Human Rights Art. 19]

A launch of leaflet balloons across the DMZ during North Korea Freedom Week now looks like it will become the next troubling step down the incremental path that authoritarians always take when they extinguish free speech. They always start by censoring a few noisy people with unpopular views. The reasons to silence them may seem perfectly sensible at the moment. It’s a particular temptation of cowardly, unprincipled politicians to bow to a heckler’s veto by censoring offending speech, and then package the censorship in justifications of public safety or national security. What we have here may be the first example of a nuclear heckler’s veto, but I’ll predict that it won’t be the last.

In this case, the noisy activists include escapees from North Korea’s horrors, and the censor will be South Korea’s “liberal” President, Moon Jae-in, who just signed an agreement with North Korea’s dictator to ban peaceful, cross-border freedom of expression to a people who are denied every other means to seek, receive, and impart information:

1. South and North Korea agreed to completely cease all hostile acts against each other in every domain, including land, air and sea, that are the source of military tension and conflict. In this vein, the two sides agreed to transform the demilitarized zone into a peace zone in a genuine sense by ceasing as of May 1 this year all hostile acts and eliminating their means, including broadcasting through loudspeakers and distribution of leaflets, in the areas along the Military Demarcation Line.

What happens when a liberal democracy chooses not to be liberal anymore? Could an authoritarian South Korea reunify with a North Korea that has never been more totalitarian? Moon Jae-in seems to think so, and his government is declaring its immediate intent to enforce the writ of the North’s Propaganda and Agitation Department on the soil of this nominally liberal democracy. That is to say, North Korea isn’t evolving beyond oppression; rather, it is South Korea that is evolving toward the acceptance of more of it.

There is so much wrong with this that it’s hard to know where to start. First, it’s more grim validation for my hypothesis that if Moon is submitting to Pyongyang’s coerced Finlandization – whether as part of some nefarious real-life John Birch fever dream, or in the mistaken belief that he can reach a stable accommodation with a nuclear-armed psychopath with messianic ambitions – he would begin by censoring defectors and political opponents, as he just did to Jae Ku, the U.S.-Korea Institute, and Thae Yong-ho. When petty despots get away with censoring a few noisy people with unpopular beliefs while journalists snore at the switch, it only whets their ambitions. As they say, democracy dies in darkness.

But as Professor Lee and I argued in The New York Times several years ago, Pyongyang’s censorship knows no limits or boundaries. This will not be its last demand to silence someone. Is there any point at which Moon is prepared to stand his ground and refuse? The Panmunjom agreement’s text never so much as pays lip service to South Koreans’ freedom of speech or expression, but does bind both Koreas to enforcing “national reconciliation and unity.” Interpret that as you wish; the genius of North Korean draftsmanship is its ambiguity. But the interpretation that matters is Kim Jong-un’s. If his interpretation isn’t the one you or Moon Jae-in would prefer, the agreement won’t pacify Kim and Moon will have achieved nothing. The more chilling possibility is that Moon and Kim do share one interpretation.

[South Korean government promotional material]

Given their relative disparities in nuclear force and political will, that is sure to end especially badly for the people of South Korea. Engagement never changes Pyongyang for the better; it is Pyongyang that almost always changes whoever it engages for the worse.

To carry this dangerous precedent to its logical conclusion, it’s worth exploring how Pyongyang defines “hostile acts.” It has used that term to describe not only annual U.S.-ROK training exercises and leafleting by non-governmental organizations, but also criticism of its crimes against humanity, the opening of a U.N. High Commission for Human Rights Office in Seoul, the enforcement of U.N. sanctions, and the acceptance of North Korean defectors (of which we’ve seen almost no evidence since Moon Jae-in entered office). If Seoul really does cease all “hostile acts” as Pyongyang defines them, my hypothesis becomes a reality.

And what concrete steps will Pyongyang take to “alleviate the acute military tension?” Will that include removing the thousands of North Korean artillery tubes and rockets aimed at South Korean cities, and if so, when? As with Seoul’s dangling of sanctions-busting economic benefits, Moon Jae-in has given Kim Jong-un valuable concessions and incentivized his worst behavior. Here is what he has to show for it:

Removing the loudspeakers was a concession of some significant value, both for its immediate effect and for its greater precedent for freedom of information campaigns for the North Korean people. As one who once questioned the loudspeakers’ effects on the North Korean soldiers manning the DMZ, I’ve grudgingly acknowledged their potential, even if the far greater potential lies in bringing the internet to North Koreans. There was a mini-surge of defections of North Korean soldiers through the DMZ in 2017, and I’d still like to know if loudspeakers influenced the defection of Oh Chong-song – he of the dramatic dash through Panmunjom last year. The strongest evidence that the regime was afraid of the loudspeakers may be the persistence of its demands that Seoul turn them off.

Now you know what I was alluding to last week when I called financial pressure “one of the two most effective forms of pressure at our disposal” against Pyongyang. The need to expand peaceful information operations is an issue that unites Republicans and Democrats in Congress. One of its most eloquent advocates is former State Department official and Obama appointee Tom Malinowski, who is now running to unseat a Republican congressman in New Jersey. Republicans like Ed Royce, Cory Gardner, and Marco Rubio have long called for expanded information operations. The good news is that the North Korean Human Rights Act, which lapsed at the end of 2017, has risen from the dead and passed the Senate, with new provisions calling on the President modernize our information operations. Similar legislation passed the House last year.

Here is yet another way in which Moon Jae-in’s appeasement of Kim Jong-un should raise concerns and will weaken his support on Capitol Hill. If, as seems likely, the talks between Donald Trump and His Porcine Majesty break down, information operations should become a second pillar of “maximum pressure,” alongside sanctions. Such a strategy would enjoy strong bipartisan support in the United States, and South Korea’s rejection of it will widen the wedge between the two allies. But as with other aspects of our North Korea policy, South Korea is choosing to abstain and obstruct, which means that we must increasingly shift our alliance strategy toward the next-nearest base of broadcasting operations: Japan. As the unity of interests between the U.S. and South Korea grows harder to identify by the day, that is where the center of gravity of our Asian alliances will inevitably shift.

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Update: My advice to those attending NKFW: (1) bring your camera phones, (2) if someone tries to stop you, film it, (3) upload the video to the internet, and (4) send me the link, or drop the URL in the comments.

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Photo credit: South China Morning Post

4 Responses

  2. The first paragraph is a gem by itself, and the entire post, well, I pray and trust is not pearls thrown to pigs. Perhaps the most interesting is “is there any point at which (ROK President) Moon is prepared to stand his ground and refuse?”. Has it yet been reliably established what “his ground” actually is?

  3. Further to Mr. Stanton’s of today, it is blessed that in the last paragraph he plugs opening a second front against His Porcine Majesty by way of facilitating non-regime-controlled communications for the benefit of the many millions of oppressed but overlooked Koreans in the north. Because USAF infrastructure in the ROK is primarily near the Yellow Sea in the west while the envisioned communications operations would most likely take place over the Sea of Japan in the east, basing the assets deployed for the operation in Japan seems to make the most logistical sense. As well it would isolate the operation from the whiles of Im Jong Seok and the sorry crew of fellow-travelers who appear to be guiding policy in the ROK these days.

  4. As always, thanks for the heads up on a significant event in the never-ending duel between the Koreas. I’m depressed at how the American scene is dominated by knee-jerk partisanship, with the Left using this as another chance to ridicule Trump, and the Right jumping at any chance to lionize him. We’re not interested in seeing what’s actually happening, and understanding why it matters….Sigh.