Almost every Christmas season at the demilitarised zone separating the two Koreas – the world’s most militarised border – a giant illuminated Christmas tree escalates tensions between the two hostile neighbours.
South Korean Christians build this festive symbol along the fortified border to communicate messages of hope and peace to their oppressed northern neighbours. North Korea, an avowed atheist anti-religious Communist state, condemns the tree as a provocative display of psychological warfare and threatens to bomb it. The nuclear-armed dictatorship in Pyongyang is so fearful of any kind of outside information that even the colourful lights of a Christmas tree present unwanted information regarding freedoms of expression and religion.
This Christmas tree is just one of the many unconventional methods being creatively used to break North Korea’s information blockade. North Korea is the most isolated country on earth. This isolation is enforced and ensured by the world’s strongest information blockade around and within the country.
North Koreans are cruelly denied information freedom. By controlling and monopolising information, the regime oppresses North Koreans under an inhumane system of institutionalised abuse and state-sanctioned atrocities in order to forcibly create and sustain obedience to Kim Jong-un’s regime.
According to a recent United Nations report, human rights abuses and crimes are so widespread in North Korea that they are, “Without parallel in the contemporary world.”
Information is power and the totalitarian Kim Jong-un regime exercises total control over it. There is no internet. There is no independent media or press. Foreign media of any kind is strictly illegal. Newspapers, books, and other reading material are completely controlled, from creation to publication to use, by the government. Libraries offer restricted resources, functioning as propaganda arms of the state. Televisions and radios are configured to receive government-approved channels and content only. Telephones, mobile phones, and other mobile devices are closely monitored.
North Koreans who defy these prohibitions risk imprisonment, torture, and execution. The paranoid regime, in fact, goes further by punishing not just the offender but their families with imprisonment, torture, and execution.
Information control is an existential concern for Pyongyang. The regime fears information that it does not completely control because it understands that freedom of information and its companions, freedom of ideas and expression, will challenge its very existence.
The nuclear-armed dictatorship in Pyongyang is so fearful of any kind of outside information that even the colourful lights of a Christmas tree present unwanted information regarding freedoms of expression and religion
This information blockade must be broken in order to expose the fallibility and erode the authority of this tyrannical government. The more information North Koreans get, the more they can question the government’s propaganda narrative that pits a resilient regime against a hostile world.
Fractures are beginning to appear in this information blockade as contraband increasingly infiltrates the closed country. Illegal information communication technologies and products are being smuggled into the country, including mobile phones, computers, flash drives, televisions, radios, and DVDs, helping to covertly broaden the oppressed information environment. North Koreans are beginning to access more outside information from diverse kinds of sources with different types of content than a few years ago.
The regime itself has unwittingly created another crack by permitting registered mobile phone access to some segments of the population. This access was recently expanded, mainly to Pyongyang’s privileged elites and residents, with estimates indicating around two million mobile phone subscribers. Although their capabilities remain limited – they are unable to make international calls or connect to the internet – they facilitate domestic interpersonal communications, which is a radical development in a country with rigid rules governing mobility from one neighbourhood to another.
Civil and human rights groups frequently launch large helium balloons carrying bundles of information products, such as DVDs, USB drives, radios, pamphlets, and miniature books containing pro-freedom and democracy information, over the militarised border. As the balloons drift across the North Korean sky, automatic timers break them open, showering their contents over the countryside to be discovered by the people below. Pyongyang warns it will attack the South Korean sites of these launches. These conventional and creative endeavours are helping to broaden the country’s information landscape by enhancing North Koreans’ access to information.
Despite its nuclear bombs, concentration camps, and militarised political economic system, one of the regime’s main vulnerabilities is information. Although currently monolithic, its information blockade is showing signs of breakage. More must be done to make these breaks irreparable in order to help support North Koreans’ right to freedom of information, weaken the regime’s information monopoly, challenge the State’s propaganda, expand North Koreans’ knowledge about the outside world, inspire North Koreans to share taboo information, strengthen informal markets to smuggle in more banned information communication technologies and products, and empower defectors to communicate and coordinate with their compatriots.
The spread of information to North Korea should not be relegated to a small group of local activists erecting Christmas trees or launching balloons, nor should it be left to smugglers sneaking forbidden goods into the country. The spread of information should become part of a broader international anti-Pyongyang and anti-Kim campaign akin to the international boycott campaign against apartheid South Africa. These information breaches have the potential for fostering greater political and socioeconomic change in the oppressed country, demonstrating the need for sustained commitments from democratic societies to help break this blockade.
Commitments should involve conventional approaches such as governmental support for radio and digital broadcasts, defector organisations, and all efforts – conventional, unconventional, covert, and illegal – to get information into the closed country.
Civil, human, political, religious, and other organisations, including internet and information communication technology companies, around the world can also support local activists through fundraising for their cause, publishing materials for and about them, spreading their news, supporting and promoting their efforts, petitioning governments especially North Korea’s primary benefactor China, and showing international solidarity.
It is important that these activists know that they are not alone or abandoned in their campaigns to get information into North Korea. It is even more important that as many North Koreans as possible discover that the outside world cares about, and is working towards, their liberation.
Marc Kosciejew is head of department and lecturer in the Department of Library Information and Archive Sciences in the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences, University of Malta.