South Korea lifts ban on Kim’s media

Tokyo South Korea’s new conservative government is breaking a taboo: President Yoon Suk Yeol plans to gradually lift blocked access to North Korean television stations, newspapers and other media. The government wants to promote mutual understanding between North and South Korea in order to prepare for reunification, said officials at the South Korean Unification Ministry.

In fact, the 1948 National Security Law has so far severely interfered with South Korean citizens’ freedom of information. Domestically, they cannot easily access the few existing North Korean websites directly. Because they are just as blocked in South Korea as South Korean media are in the north.

The mutual media ban dates back to a time when North and South Korea were actually in an ideological and economic competition between the systems. Unlike in divided Germany, where travel and the flow of information were restricted, contacts of any kind have been fundamentally blocked in Korea since the country was divided. Because in the north as well as in the south, the government worried that the subjects could fall victim to the propaganda of the other side.

North Korea’s attack on the South, which led to the bloody Korean War between 1950 and 1953, further deepened the division. Since then, both governments have only occasionally organized family reunions for a few selected Koreans. Many families, on the other hand, have been separated for more than 70 years, meaning that societies have grown far more apart than East and West Germany did during the Cold War.

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South Korea’s capital Seoul

According to the government in Seoul, North Korea’s state propaganda cannot do any harm.

(Photo: imago images/Imaginechina-Tuchong)

For a long time, South Korea’s left in particular had hoped to abolish the law in order to improve relations with the North. In 2004, the Uri party tried, the predecessor of today’s Democratic Party, whose top candidate lost the spring election to the conservative Yoon. But without success.

Not even Yoon’s popular predecessor, left-wing President Moon Jae In, tried again to abolish the relic, although he otherwise met with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un several times and signed important bilateral declarations.

Instead, it was more or less tolerated when citizens visited North Korean sites on the Internet or watched propaganda films on YouTube. Now it falls to a Conservative President of all people to repeal the law against resistance in his own ranks.

Reunification Minister knows Germany

For Bernhard Seliger, this is a success: “It is not yet known how this easing will turn out and what will actually be liberalized,” says the local representative of the Hanns Seidel Foundation, the party foundation of the German Christian Social Union. “But that this process has even started is a very important and commendable step.”

For Seliger, this success for press freedom also has a name: Kwon Young Se, the reunification minister. He is a good expert on German reunification and was for a long time chairman of the Korean-German Friendship Society in the Korean National Assembly.

Defense Ministry officials have openly admitted that mistrust of their own population was too great, Seliger says. But Minister Kwon, like Yoon a former prosecutor, takes a different view because of his lessons from the division of Germany. “He saw in Germany that there was absolutely no danger from East German propaganda, not even from a post-communist party in parliament.”

Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, wife Kim Keon Hee

The new South Korean head of state allows North Korean state media – and achieves an image boost.

(Photo: AP)

Even before his appointment as minister by parliament, he suggested maintaining continuity in the North Korea strategy after the change of power.

President Yoon is relying more on deterring North Korea, which is increasing its nuclear arsenal despite United Nations sanctions. But Kwon promised that the new government would not only keep the treaties agreed under Moon. He also agreed to visit the North Korean capital of Pyongyang and provide humanitarian assistance.

In addition, he does not want to base the strategy solely on the human rights issue in order to embarrass the North Korean leadership. It is about improving the quality of life of the North Korean people. He only wants to change the points where left-wing ex-President Moon was wrong. The new government will make amends for the former government’s submissive attitude and indifferent attitude toward denuclearization, Kwon said. President Yoon promises massive economic aid to North Korea if leader Kim moves towards denuclearization – but only then.

At the same time, Kwon apparently trusts that North Korean propaganda, with its cult of leadership, its flowery outbursts of insults and threats, is too abstruse in South Korea to be widely heard. “Moreover, lifting the ban is a cheap, symbolic victory over North Korea,” says North Korea expert Seliger. Because the government is demonstrating the difference between the free, successful and mature South and the despotically governed, unfree North Korea.

And North Korea will do nothing to counter that. In the past, citizens could only watch South Korean soap operas via smuggled recordings. Experts consider it extremely unlikely that the regime could now grant its own subjects free access to South Korean media.

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