Memories of 'ppira'
By Choi Sung-jin
When I was a little boy, I lived in Huam-dong, a hillside neighborhood of Mount Nam, Seoul. It was back in the mid-1960s when kids had little to play with, and we often went to the mountain. Yes, Mount Nam was a mountain for third graders.
Mount Nam then was far better than now. It had no wire lath walls, and its valleys had water enough for some women to do the laundry. Now and then, we could pick some “ppira” there. I still don't know why people called those flyers ppira, but I guess it was the mispronunciation of the English word, “handbill.”
We had no idea where they came from but were sure who made them ― North Korean spies or their sympathizers in the South. The fliers were full of praise for North Korea or raw accusations against the then South Korean President Park Chung-hee and his government. Some crudely doctored photos made us giggle as they described the former leader as a womanizer.
We brought them to the police station, and once in a while officers gave us notebooks or pencils. It was just for fun or the occasional reward, but even grade-schoolers did not believe what the leaflets said.
They did absolutely nothing to change our young minds and instead made us have contempt for their makers and spreaders. Looking back, they seemed to be the only visual propaganda tool when even a black-and-white TV was a luxury item for families.
More than half a century has since passed, and the leaflets are back.
Now it is some in the South who make and send the 21st-century version of ppira to the North.
And the Moon Jae-in administration has come under fire ― here and across the Pacific ― for prohibiting by law the sending of anti-North Korean leaflets across the inter-Korean border.
Moon's opponents say the new law abuses the human rights of the “leafleteers,” mainly those who defected from the North to the South, by infringing on their freedom of expression and depriving North Koreans of access to information from outside. These assertions are hard to refute, pinpointing the universal values of human rights and freedom of speech.
However, I think the Moon administration did the right thing for at least three reasons.
First of all, the leaflets' effectiveness is doubtful, which is why I recounted my old memories at great length. Their content, including some indecent ones targeting Kim Jong-un, are as low as their North Korean counterparts were more than 50 years ago and will only backfire.
North Korea is undoubtedly a closed society, but CNN shows not a few people there use mobile phones. In these times of smartphones and SNS, there must be far better ways to “enlighten” North Koreans than leaflets, CDs and a few U.S. dollars.
Second, the leaflets can trigger accidental military clashes between Koreas, as they almost did six years ago. On Oct. 19, 2014, North Korean soldiers fired 14.4-mm anti-aircraft guns even before the balloons crossed the border. At first, the South Korean troops did not know the shots came from the North.
Had they known and responded in kind, no one knows what might have happened in an escalating exchange of fire. The Moon government ― or any government for that matter ― must have found it not easy to keep turning a deaf ear to petitions from more than 3,000 residents in the border area to block the leaflets. The right to live comes ahead of the right to express ones political opinions.
Third, sending leaflets or staging a propaganda war ― if it is useful ― violates the inter-Korean accords not to slander each other and hinder dialogue. The Koreas have repeatedly agreed to cease slanderous verbal attacks. Most recently, they decided to discontinue spreading leaflets, loudspeaker broadcasts, and all other acts of hostility along the border, at the inter-Korean summit at Panmunjeom on April 27, 2018.
The Koreas agreed to solve their problems through talks. There is always the needs to walk in each other's shoes. Suppose North Korean civilians keep sending anti-South leaflets to weaken the South Korean government, if not toppling it. Will Seoul readily accept Pyongyang's offer for talks?
Some U.S. government officials and members of Congress have recently expressed concerns about the leafletting ban. A Republican lawmaker, who co-chairs a bipartisan commission on human rights, has reportedly taken issue with the legislation and will hold a congressional hearing in January. Their worries are understandable in principle.
The Moon administration should do its best to explain the peculiar situation facing the Koreas and the new law's inevitability. Some officials of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea were undiplomatic and politically inept when they branded the U.S. expression of concerns as “interference in internal affairs.”
That said, I cannot help but raise a couple of questions about some American and European officials' moves. First, global villagers are increasingly skeptical whether the U.S. or Western Europe are qualified any longer to tell another party to do this or that concerning human rights issues.
In America, numerous people die only because they have a different skin color. How different is the Black Lives Matter movement from anti-apartheid fights decades ago? Some Western European countries' handling of refugees could hardly be called glowing examples of respect for human rights.
After all, where else in this world are people sending hostile leaflets to another country with their supporters' moral and financial encouragement, local and foreign? If their enablers say it should be allowed on this peninsula because the Cold War has yet to end here, they will only be prolonging it.
The time has long passed to bid farewell to ppira.
Choi Sung-jin (choisj1955@naver.com) is a Korea Times columnist.