Reverse Propaganda

By Ben Freeman, Photo By Sam Wheadon, Illustrations Courtesy of AIMSKOREA.ORG

Meet Noh, disseminator of subversive anti-North Korean materials.

Noh Young Sung was born and raised in North Korea. His father was a veteran of the war between the North and South who became a beekeeper. Noh and his family survived on meager means and often ate grass and tree bark to supplement small scrapings of honey from Dad’s hives. After his parents divorced, Noh escaped across the Tumen River into China with his mother and sister.

Today there are an estimated 150,000 North Koreans living illegally in China, and nearly all support themselves by working in heinous places, such as unregulated coal mines. Before he was fired for being an illegal alien, Noh worked as a miner. Noh was eventually caught, imprisoned, repatriated to North Korea, and locked up again. Later he re-escaped across the Tumen back into China and tracked down his sister. She put him in touch with a group of Christian activists who made a documentary film about Noh’s defection, which it used to exert diplomatic pressure on South Korea and secure Noh residential status. That’s the short story, anyway.

Noh now works with a defectors’ organization, sending airborne reverse-propaganda messages over the border into North Korea. When I first heard about this, I pictured a group of guys sneaking up to a barbed-wire fence with notes scrawled on McDonald’s menus attached to a few helium-filled party balloons, flinging them into the air, making a wish, and heading home feeling smug. Noh explained that it’s a bit more complicated.

Messages slamming the North Korean government are secured to balloons weighing up to 50 pounds, which are then pointed in the direction of strategic locations on the other side of the border. This activity is known as

Bbi-ra

, and defectors gather in groups of five or six to carry out a single hope-dissemination mission. Mostly they distribute interviews, personal accounts of escape and life in the outside world, poetry, illustrations, and calls for revolution. Photos are never sent because they’re easy to trace and can be used as evidence by counterintelligence teams in North Korea. Most defectors are certain this is an effective way of speeding up the unification process and spend up to three hours each day sending out a single balloon. This practice, though, is in no way officially sanctioned by the South Korean government, which sees it as interfering with an already hugely unstable diplomatic process with the North.

We got hold of some of this reverse propaganda, which follows. It is not pretty.

Excerpt from “I Sell My Daughter for 100 Won”

By defector poet Chang Jinsung

Wherever there are people

There is the sound of gunshots.

Today in front of the public

Another someone is executed.

You should never feel compassion.

If dead, you have to kill once again, with rage.

Left unsaid from the declaration

In front of the bang-bang of gunshots

How so is it that today

the silence of the people feels heavier?

Stealing a sack of rice,

The criminal was killed with 90 gunshots.

His occupation

a farmer.

These drawings are based on firsthand accounts of North Korean refugees who were interviewed after arriving safely in South Korea.

A North Korean officer forces a man to eat cow shit.

This guy is made to do a handstand while being kicked in the stomach.

The image above depicts the hearing of a pregnant North Korean defector who was later subjected to a forced abortion.

What follows is a letter from a 12-year-old who escaped Prison 16 in North Hamkyungdo, Hwasung-gun, and a note written by the defectors who sent the message over the border.

“We lived in Pyongyang. One day, the security department came and said that Father was a spy from the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency and locked our family at the Yongduk prison. For a month they didn’t give us any food so we drank our own piss and I picked out barley from dog feces and ate it. My sister was very pretty and she was at the University of Music for instrumental music; the people from the security department burned her pubic hair with a lighter, raped her, and urinated on her face. They said she was protesting so they stubbed cigarette butts on her nipples and one day brought a bowl of feces and forced her to eat it. They said Father wouldn’t admit to being a spy and told us to hit him. If we didn’t they said they’d starve us and burn my sister with a lighter so we hit Father.

“After that, Father took a spear from the security officer’s waist and stabbed himself in the stomach and died. Mother sat in the toilet and ate three bowls of feces and died. My sister died after being raped and eating potatoes and soil from the field. I alone escaped prison and am hiding in China.

“When I grow up I will revenge my father, my mother, and my sister. An aid person from South Korea who helps North Korean defectors told me if I write about what happened to me in the past in a letter it will be delivered to South Korea. I write this letter in tears; it makes me think of my father, my mother, and my sister even more. Please help me.”

This child is now going to school in South Korea in freedom, waiting for the day when North Korea is freed.

People of North Korea! They say that the newborn has not the option of choosing the country that it’s born into.

If the people of North Korea have to endure this kind of suffering just to be born in North Korea, what kind of an unfair world are we living in?

People of North Korea, we are people born to be loved.