By Alexandre Dor
South Korea’s propaganda broadcasting is a potent weapon, challenging the North’s monopoly on information.
When two South Korean soldiers had their legs amputated due to North Korea’s placement of box mines in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the Republic of Korea responded by blasting weather reports, K-pop hits, and Buddhist teachings over the zone via loudspeakers. Infuriated, North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un raised all military and reserve personnel to a “quasi-state of war,” threatened to turn South Korea into a “sea of fire,” and recommenced broadcasts of their own propaganda.
Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency then asserted that “the resumption of the propaganda loudspeaker campaign is a direct provocation of war against us,” giving Seoul an ultimatum — stop the propaganda broadcast or be held responsible for it as an “open act of war.” Fortunately, the August crisis was deescalated through high-level talks and marathon negotiations.
What was lost on many in the respite brought by tentative peace was why the loudspeaker systems are viewed as direct threats to Kim Jong-un’s regime. These broadcasts are seen as such a threat that the Hermit Kingdom upgraded in 2014 from C.W. [Morse code] jammers to tactical Multi-Pulse jammers in order to counter shortwave dissemination of Voice of Freedom.
“South Korea can reach [with its broadcasts] military stations near the front line and North Koreans living next to the frontline” says Cho Han-bum, senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification. “The [Kim Jong-un] regime is extremely sensitive to the South’s loudspeaker broadcasting as it can reach all the way to Kaesong,” a city of a little less than 200,000 people.
Read the full story at The Diplomat