Home  >  Censorship

From Sunshine to solar eclipse: Can Moon Jae-in censor his way to reunification?

FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS, THE STATED PREMISE OF THE SUNSHINE THEORY of “engagement” with the regime in Pyongyang has been that economic incentives and integration would gradually draw it into the community of civilized nations and spur political reform, disarmament, peace, and eventual reunification. The Sunshine Policy and its progeny promised that the gentle suasion of liberalization would win over even those responsible for “crimes against humanity, arising from ‘policies established at the highest level of State,’” including as complete an extirpation of freedom of speech, religion, and press as any regime in human history has ever enforced.

But how can a political system that is antithetical to free speech unify with a political system that tolerates it? Arguably, no one knows the power of free speech quite so well as those who would stop at nothing to extinguish it. And so, for 20 years, while governments in Seoul pursued the Sunshine Policy with varying intensity, Pyongyang successfully resisted political reform and openness. But what if it’s the other Korea that changes — not into a system that is totalitarian, strictly speaking, but one that is authoritarian enough to be a safe space for the supremacy of the totalitarian one? For years now, North Korea has made demands — to which former President Park Geun-hye nominally acceded — to ban “slander” of its political system by South Koreans, and some on the left have been enthusiastic supporters of enforcing such a ban.

Korea’s left and right have both used South Korea’s defamation laws against their critics, but the left’s use of them has been more systematic and aggressive since former President Roh Moo-hyun entered the Blue House in 2003 and made current President Moon Jae-in his Chief of Staff. Human Rights Watch, among others, has criticized South Korea’s defamation laws for their “chilling effect on freedom of expression … by deterring people from speaking out against misconduct by public officials.” Those laws carry criminal penalties, including jail time. Journalists are rightfully terrified of them. In most cases, it is no defense under these laws that the defendant’s statement was true. They recognize no privilege for debating matters of public interest, even during political campaigns or parliamentary debates. They protect neither journalists who would expose public corruption nor whistleblowers who would expose the guilty secrets of politicians.

Even before they came to power, Moon and his allies used defamation suits to suppress debate about their history of anti-anti-North Korean, pro-North Korean, and anti-American views. Now, although North Korea is as totalitarian as ever, the South’s freedoms of speech and press are under an accelerating attack of censorship to silence the ruling party’s political opponents, North Korean defectors, and critics of Pyongyang’s human rights abuses. There are too many examples of this to relate in narrative form, so I’ve reduced them to a chronology.

  • 3-9-2017: Park Geun-hye impeached and removed from office.
  • 4-10-2017: During the tumultuous period before a new president is elected, a court fines a sitting center-right lawmaker $4300 for calling members of the hard-left lawyers’ group Minbyun “jongbuk,” a term that connotes political sympathy with North Korea.
  • 4-24-2017: Moon Jae-in’s presidential campaign sues a former colleague in the Roh administration, ex-Foreign Minister Song Min-soon, for writing in his memoirs that Moon suggested asking Pyongyang for its views about how Seoul should vote on a U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning North Korea for its human rights abuses. Seoul abstained from that vote. Moon initially said he couldn’t remember what happened at the time, then later denied Song’s claim. Song subsequently produced evidence to bolster his claim.
  • 5-10-2017: Moon Jae-in sworn in as President.
  • 7-20-2017: Prosecutors indict former prosecutor Ko Young-ju for defamation, for calling President Moon a Communist. Ko based his accusation on the specific evidence found during a criminal investigation he oversaw years ago when Moon was a left-wing lawyer and activist in Busan. (At the time, under the right’s censorship, it was illegal to promote communism or pro-North Korean ideology.) Now, with the tables turned, the prosecutor who charged Ko asked the court to jail him for a year and a half. Dr. Tara O, who has guest-posted here and now has her own blog, recently summarized the evidence Ko submitted in an attempt to assert truth as a defense.
  • Sept.-Dec. 2017: Strikes by hard-left unions force out the management of public broadcasters MBC and KBS and replace them with more Moon-friendly management. Historically, both political parties have applied a spoils system to public media, but this transfer of power is unusual for its implicit threat of force.
  • 1-17-2018: A conservative news site reports that Choo Mi-ae, the head of the ruling Democratic Party, threatens to file defamation suits against conservative critics of the President for using a Korean-language pun on Moon’s name that sounds like “disaster.”
  • 1-18-2018: Left-leaning OhMyNews publishes an interview with SBS reporter Kim Tae-hoon, who accuses the government of trying to control his use of language that might offend Pyongyang in his reporting of possible military contigency plans.

  • 1-23-2018: Almost immediately after Kim Jong-un announces his willingness to send a team to the Pyeongchang Olympics, the Blue House calls on the public to show “respect” for North Korea and refrain from provoking it. The same day, a conservative group holds a political protest and burns images of Kim Jong-un and North Korean flags. North Korea calls these acts “unpardonable atrocities” and the protesters “traitors and psychopaths.” It says that if those who had defamed “the dignified Korean nation are allowed to go scot-free, the national reconciliation, unity and the building of a reunified powerful country will be delayed so much.” It demands that South Korea’s government apologize for the protest. Shortly thereafter, the Joongang Ilbo reports that police are investigating the protesters.
  • 1-24-2018: The right-leaning Chosun Ilbo reports that the South Korean government asked high-ranking defector Thae Yong-ho to keep a low profile during the Olympics.
  • 4-4-2018: An op-ed in the center-right Joongang Ilbo claims that the Blue House has a blacklist of scholars who have criticized Moon’s North Korea policy. The government angrily denies the allegation and threatens legal action.

  • 4-4-2018: Via UPI: “The JoongAng Ilbo reported Wednesday the Moon administration has been pressuring researchers and policy experts as leaders of North and South plan to meet. The newspaper stated experts including defector Ahn Chan-il, president of the World Institute for North Korea Studies, who fled the regime in 1979, was banned from making television appearances for a month, and high-profile defector Thae Yong-ho had been asked to cut back on his activities.” The Blue House denies the report.
  • 4-6-2018: The South Korean government pulls grant funds from, and thereby destroys, the U.S.-Korea Institute for refusing to fire two Korean-American scholars — one of whom it had ideological differences with, and one for reasons that still aren’t clear.
  • 4-12-2018: Moon Jae-in’s son sues two lawmakers for defamation for saying that in 2009, his father, then-President Roh Moo-hyun’s Chief of Staff, used his influence to get the son a government job.
  • 4-16-2018: Thae Yong-ho goes to a conference in Seoul to talk about Pyongyang’s likely negotiation strategy at an upcoming North-South summit. Thae’s government security detail prevents a reporter from filming Thae’s remarks. The news article reporting the security detail’s interference with the coverage of Thae’s speech is taken offline almost immediately.

  • 5-1-2018: Choo Mi-ae tweets a threat to sue an opposition lawmaker for libel for calling the President a “crazy bastard.”
  • 5-10-2018: South Korean police stop defectors and human rights activists from launching leaflet balloons over the DMZ, something the activists had been doing for 15 years without incident, except for violent counter-protests by hard-left activists and Pyongyang’s threats to answer peaceful speech with violent attacks.
  • 5-25-2018: The Daily NK reports that defectors in South Korea are getting calls from North Korean government security services, urging them to “re-defect” back to the North. Historically, North Korean agents have used threats against defectors’ family members to coerce them into returning and giving staged press conferences in Pyongyang, praising Kim Jong-un and claiming that they were tricked into defecting. This story gives context to Pyongyang’s preposterous big-lie claim, in the worst Goebbelsian tradition, that 12 North Korean waitresses and their manager were tricked into defecting, and to its demand that they be repatriated to the North.
  • 5-30-2018: Journalist Byun Hee-jae is arrested and jailed on defamation charges for claiming that a former presidential aide colluded with the broadcaster JTBC to manipulate the contents of two tablet PCs whose discovery led to the impeachment of former President Park. The court that convicted Park of corruption, however, had refused to admit the tablets into evidence because they were “found by a reporter under circumstances that remain unclear.”
  • 5-31-2018: Moon Jae-in’s Chief of Staff, Im Jong-seok, sues Dr. Ji Man-won for calling him “jusapa,” another term that connotes sympathy with North Korea. As previously noted here, Im has a long personal history of pro-North Korean and anti-American activism, and since 20053 was Pyongyang’s financial agent in the South, collecting its intellectual property royalties and funneling those funds to Pyongyang.
  • 8-19-2018: Shortly after Thae Yong-ho calls on South Koreans to work to liberate North Koreans, a small group of South Korean juchejugend holds a demonstration mock-executing him and fellow defector-activist Park Sang-hak with a super-soaker. In 2012, a North Korean agent was sentenced to four years in prison for attempting to assassinate Park. Thae and his family are under guard from the National Intelligence Service to protect them from North Korean assassins.
  • 8-28-2018: The South China Morning Post reports that North Korean defectors in the South increasingly feel pressured to avoid criticizing Pyongyang:

One defector, who gives lectures on North Korean society in the South, was given an instruction from superiors to avoid calling the reclusive state a “nuclear regime”. They also said that they had been “encouraged” to treat issues such as North Korean political prison camps and human rights issues as taboo, according to the person.

. . . .

Choi Seong-guk, an animator who fled to South Korea eight years ago, also said he felt his freedom of speech was under pressure when he spoke out against the inter-Korean reconciliation.

. . . .

Choi, who draws satirical cartoons about the North’s human rights violations, said he was “kicked out” of a South Korean television show once for making negative comments about Kim. “They asked my opinion about Kim Jong-un’s trip to South Korea. I told them we cannot believe him as people in North Korea always say ‘peace will only come after all the capitalists in the South disappear’. We shouldn’t be tricked by Kim Jong-un,” Choi said.

“Then, the host said: ‘Thank you very much’ and kicked me out of the show shortly after. It took less than five minutes.” Choi said sponsorship by businesspeople for his artwork had also been cut, but he was not sure if it had to do with his political stance. [SCMP, Josephine Ma & Lee Jeong-ho]

Like other stories of the Moon administration’s censorship, this one rhymes with the history of Roh Moo-hyun’s censorship. A 2005 survey found that “[n]ineteen percent of [North Korean] escapees who had criticized the South Korean government, the North Korean regime, or Kim Jong Il … received a warning or threat by administration officials.”

  • 9-10-2018: Tara O cites the right-leaning site Pennmike, which reports that South Korea’s ruling party “has submitted a ‘broadcast law reform’ bill to regulate individuals who post videos on Youtube and other video sites as ‘mass media,'” and that would subject even YouTube videos to state review and censorship.

[Get used to seeing more of this, then.]

  • 9-14-2018: Pennmike and Blue Today report that in the wake of its revelations that South Korea was importing North Korean coal in violation of U.N. sanctions, VOA reporters are banned from Blue House press conferences.
  • 9-14-2018: Former President Chun Doo-hwan is an unsympathetic martyr; he deserves to be remembered as a mass murderer. But if you agree that the 1980 Gwangju Massacre is an important historical event, it is important to debate it openly. Instead, a court recently fined him 70 million won for denying in his memoirs a claim by an “activist” priest that helicopters fired on the crowds. In doing so, Chun cited contemporary accounts by military officers. The potential for bias on both sides of this argument is clear, so why not air all the evidence? But instead, “The judge also banned the memoirs from being sold or reissued until the offending passages are expunged.” Chun now faces criminal charges for defamation for disputing an allegation of immense public and historical interest. Why bring up Chun’s case? Because his well-deserved unpopularity makes him a perfect target for aspiring authoritarians to set or broaden a precedent for suppressing political debate.
  • 9-16-2018: A court acquits Ko Young-ju, the former prosecutor, of criminal defamation for calling President Moon Jae-in a communist. Because South Korea has no protection against double jeopardy, the prosecution is appealing the judgment. One wonders how much expense and stress Ko has already endured over this politically motivated prosecution.
  • 9-21-2018: Via Yonhap: “Prosecutors raided a veteran opposition lawmaker’s office Friday as part of an investigation into allegations his aides accessed digital files on fiscal budgets and other confidential statistics without clearance.” The lawmaker responds that his staff was authorized to access the information, and that they were performing their rightful duties in auditing the administration’s budget.

Even in South Korea, which has always been barren ground for freedom of speech, this is not normal. So far, few Koreans seem to mind that much. Americans haven’t noticed, either. Many of our most prominent Korea experts have never lived in Korea and don’t appreciate the strength of its nationalism and the weakness of its democratic institutions.2 Others seem to pull their punches, for fear of losing the lavish grant funds Seoul uses to buy their silence and support. Most of the foreign press corps in Korea is too favorably biased toward Moon and his policies to criticize either. When right-leaning governments censor journalists, lawmakers, or activists, Choe Sang-hun will almost certainly write all about it in the New York Times, but when left-leaning governments do it, you probably won’t read it anywhere but here.1 That’s a significant omission if you know how much censorship the left has been responsible for in recent years.

Liberals (and principled conservatives) were rightly outraged when in 2016, Donald Trump said, “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when [journalists] write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.” Our own Supreme Court has long recognized the danger that the abuse of defamation suits by government officials and public figures poses to free debate on matters of public interest and builds in legal protections allowing for the early dismissal of such suits. Most democracies — including even the U.K. — have since reformed their defamation laws to include similar protections. In South Korea, defamation law has become to the left what the National Security Law once was for the right — a gaping loophole in South Korea’s constitutional right of free speech. The abuse of defamation law now presents an immediate threat to the South’s preservation as a free society.

~ ~ ~

1. For the record, I also complained when Park Geun-hye censored journalists. I try to be more objective than Choe Sang-hun. Admittedly, it’s a low bar.

2. Those values clashed directly and illustrated which of them sits higher in South Koreans’ hierarchy of values when crowds in the South extended a warm welcome to North Korea’s censor-in-chief.

3. Previously said “until” 2005. Since corrected.

Photo credit