[HCDX] South Korea Foils Airlift of Radios to North

["Mike Brooker" <aum108@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From today's New York Times.. The article doesn't mention what brand of
radio, or whether the radios they attempted to airlift covered AM FM, and
SW.

South Korea Foils Airlift of Radios to North
By JAMES BROOKE

HOLWON, South Korea, Aug. 22 - All in all, it was a perfect day for breaking
North Korea's information monopoly, and Dr. Norbert Vollertsen and his band
of volunteers were determined to take advantage of it. A brisk wind from the
south was driving clouds and, Dr. Vollertsen hoped, large balloons carrying
transistor radios north over the barbed wire of the demilitarized zone into
North Korea, a country closed off from the rest of the world.

But before the specially designed cargo balloons could be inflated with
helium, South Korean police officers clambered aboard the truck and subdued
Dr. Vollertsen, who is German, so roughly that he needed medical treatment.

"The law requires that organizers of rallies or demonstrations notify the
local police 48 hours in advance," said Kim Bu Wook, Kangwon Province's
police chief.. This was before a two-hour standoff degenerated into a
shoving match between riot policemen and members of a growing international
movement to break the half-century information monopoly that North Korea's
Communist government has maintained over its 22 million people.

Until 2000, South Korea's military sent thousands of balloons north from
border towns like this one, usually in the summer when the prevailing winds
were favorable. But under the so-called sunshine policy of reconciliation,
South Korea has tried to avoid irritating North Korea.

By blocking the private efforts to distribute radios, however, South Korea
has placed itself on a collision course with Washington. Over the summer,
both chambers of the United States Congress voted overwhelmingly to expand
the daily Korean-language broadcasting of Radio Free Asia to 24 hours from 4
hours.

By law North Koreans are allowed to have only radios and televisions that
are locked onto the state frequencies. Residents with illegal tuneable sets
can listen to Korean-language government broadcasts from China, Russia and
South Korea, a Christian group in South Korea, and two stations financed by
the United States government, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.

But few North Koreans have access to normal radios and televisions, and
North Korean defectors say that information controls in North Korea are far
tighter than they were in Eastern Europe under the Communists.

South Korean officials said earlier this week that they would allow the
balloon launchings to go ahead. But the government apparently reversed that
decision to avoid provoking North Korea in anticipation of six-country
negotiations over North Korea's nuclear program, scheduled to start in
Beijing on Wednesday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/23/international/asia/23KORE.html

73

Mike Brooker
Toronto, ON

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