Activists resume balloon launches aimed at reclusive North Korea
Park Sang-hak holding packages of leaflets before launching them on May 10. Image | Fighters for Free North Korea
Fighters for Free North Korea (FFNK) has resumed sending informational leaflets to North Korea.
Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector and activist who leads the organization, confirmed through email that his organization sent hundreds of thousands of leaflets that are critical of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, along with 2000 USBs containing external content, using large balloons launched from Ganghwa island of South Korea around 11:00 PM local time on May 10.
“We sent 300,000 anti-North Korean leaflets condemning Kim Jong-un’s verbal abuse against the 80 million Koreans who long for the peaceful unification of the Korean Peninsula and 2,000 USB sticks containing footage of K-pop and trot through 20 large balloons” Park said.
The organization’s launch of leaflets this time was, according to the press release, partly in response to Kim Jong-un’s recent policy change concerning South Korea, as well as to help address North Koreans’ right to know. In his speech at the 10th session of the 14th Supreme People’s Assembly in January, Kim described the Republic of Korea as “the most hostile state” and “a foreign country” and discarded his predecessors’ long standing national policy of seeking unification with the South. Following Kim’s drastic policy change towards the South, a number of organizations related to handling inter-Korean relations were disbanned and any references to unification in school textbooks were ordered to be removed, among other measures taken.
Park’s leaflet launch comes at a time when activists based in South Korea have resumed their work in recent months, including sending leaflets to people in the North, following the South Korean Constitutional Court’s ruling last September that the anti-leaflet law which banned such activities is unconstitutional. Lee Min-bok, a defector and head of Campaign for Helping North Korea in a Direct Way, an organization that sends such leaflets to the North, recently told VOA about the resumption of their work in six years.
The North Korean regime tells its people only that which suits its interests and strictly prohibits their access to information from the outside world to maintain its totalitarian rule. To help activists’ work in breaking this information blockade, HRF established the program Flash Drives for Freedom (FDFF). For more information, please visit its website.
Seongmin is the director of the Korea Desk at the Human Rights Foundation.
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