Radio station breaks N Korea blockade

By Anna Fifield in Seoul

Published: May 11 2007 18:24 | Last updated: May 11 2007 18:24

Sitting in the basement of an unmarked building in western Seoul with his headphones on, short, smiling Kim Seong-min hardly looks like a threat to national security.

But to Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s self-styled “Dear Leader”, that is exactly what Kim Seong-min and his eight colleagues at the US-backed Free North Korea Radio represent.

Once a propaganda writer in the Korean People’s Army, Mr Kim is beaming information into the world’s most isolated country, where outside news is so tightly controlled that all radios are pre-set to the state station.

The broadcasts aggressively call for change in Pyongyang. One recent programme was titled “Kim Jong-il, demonic homicide” and called for the North Korean regime to be “ended as soon as possible”. “North Korean people, you should not let Kim Jong-il do what he wants,” it declared.

Kim Seong-min launched Free North Korea Radio three years ago with the aim of convincing North Koreans of the merits of freedom and democracy and highlighting human rights abuses there.

For one hour each night, it broadcasts lectures on democracy, defectors’ letters and poems, and religious messages.

Breaking the information blockade – as happened in eastern Europe – is the only way to bring about change in North Korea, says Andrei Lankov, a North Korea specialist at Kookmin University in Seoul who regularly discusses the fall of the Soviet bloc on Free North Korea Radio.

“North Korea is exceptionally vulnerable to information from the outside world,” Mr Lankov says. “No other country has ever had such a successful capitalist rival [in South Korea] as North Korea, and this information is explosive.”

The broadcasters have no idea how many people listen to their programmes but an estimated 5 per cent of North Korea’s 23m people now have smuggled radios or ones that can be adjusted to different frequencies.

Kim Seong-min says many refugees now in South Korea tell him they heard his broadcasts while in the North, and he himself used to listen to South Korean radio broadcasts while he was in the army. “At that time I thought there was an unknown world and my life would be empty if I died without seeing it,” he says.

The impact seems have given Pyongyang cause for concern. It has has asked the South to stop the station from broadcasting, while the Rodong Shinmun, the Workers’ party newspaper, has railed against the station.

But Mr Kim also faces opposition in the South. The government, which is trying to engage the North, is uncomfortable with the station’s aggressive message, and leftwing student groups have called for it to be shut .

The station began operations with money from defectors and local activists and now receives support from the National Endowment for Democracy, a US organisation funded by Congress.

President George W. Bush’s administration has requested sharp funding rises to promote human rights in North Korea, asking Congress for $10m (€7.4m, £5m) next year, most of which will be devoted to broadcasting. “Through means such as radio broadcasting, North Koreans can learn that they do not live in a ‘socialist paradise’,” Jay Lefkowitz, Mr Bush’s special envoy on North Korean human rights, recently told a congressional committee.

Kim Seong-min’s efforts won him an invitation to the White House last year. But the Bush administration’s new tack of trying to negotiate with Pyongyang has Mr Kim ruing that visit now.

“Kim Jong-il is like Satan, so now I think Bush a hypocrite for negotiating with him,” he says.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

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