Opening up N. Korea most essential
Defector leads campaign to send leaflets via balloons
By Kim Se-jeong
CHEORWON, Gangwon Province — Lee Min-bok, 53, is not a writer, but he puts pen to paper extensively.
He’s not a photographer, but constantly takes pictures and searches for photos.
Lee is an activist working to open up North Korean society by delivering information via balloons.
“Kim Jong-il’s communism is a flat lie. What you know about South Korea as a starving neighbor is wrong. North Korea lost the Korean War. What’s known as the cause of the war is also a complete lie. A legend about Kim Il-sung’s birth is incorrect,” read a sentence from a vinyl-covered leaflet he sent to the North.
Also, there was a photo showing street protesters in Egypt. “It’s time for Koreans to rise against 60 years of dictatorship,” the caption read.
“North Korea is so closed that a protest like that (what happened in Egypt) is inconceivable. Opening up the society is the most essential thing,” he said, when asked whether a grassroots uprising would be possible.
Do they reach North Koreans? Yes, he is living evidence.
Lee is a North Korean defector. A native of Hwanghae Province in North Korea, he came across a leaflet during his travels near the border in 1990. The leaflet, he recalled, said the outbreak of the Korean War was a result of North Korean aggression, not South Korea or the United States.
“I had already heard similar allegations (by that time), and seeing the leaflet carrying the same content, I came to believe it.”
He fled North Korea and arrived in the South in 2005.
Lee Ja-yeon, a researcher at the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, said defectors from the southern part of North Korea had been most exposed to the leaflets.
“We have seen many defectors from Hwanghae and Gangwon provinces saying that they had seen leaflets, whereas it is less common among people from the North’s northern provinces.”
The center makes it a rule to interview North Korean defectors who arrive in the South to accumulate anecdotal evidence of human rights violations in the country.
Sending leaflets has been part of psychological warfare carried out by both the militaries from the two Koreas. While such activities were more prevalent in the 1980s and ’90s, the South Korean military still sends them from time to time. North Korea has stopped the practice.
Having purchased a piece of land on Baengnyeong Island in the West Sea, he also travels to the east coast. On Feb. 16, Kim Jong-il’s birthday, Lee and some volunteers went to a piece of high ground in Cheorwon.
He had originally planned to send propaganda balloons from Ganghwa Island off the west coast, but changed his mind, believing that the wind would be better in the border city in Gangwon Province.
A hydrogen-filled balloon, 12 meters tall, carries a seven-kilogram vinyl bag full of leaflets. Each bag contains approximately 60,000 leaflets. On that day, he prepared 28 bags, each of which also included medicines, $1 bills, pencils and food, among other things.
The most important thing is a timer that opens the vinyl bag after an hour or two so that the leaflets are released over North Korea.
Looking at the balloons floating toward North Korea, Lee said, “They will definitely surprise North Koreans who would probably be feeling grateful for special foods given to them on Kim Jong-il’s birthday. I’m so glad the wind is blowing in the right direction.”
On the same day, a coalition of North Korean human rights activist groups based in the South and seven lawmakers from the ruling Grand National Party gathered near a border area west of Seoul to send leaflets to North Korea via balloons in a highly publicized event.