[HCDX] Sneaking tiny radios into North Korea

["Mike Terry" <miketerry73@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fri, Nov. 12, 2004

U.S. plans to sneak tiny radios into North Korea for its information-starved
citizens

By Tim Johnson
Knight Ridder Newspapers


Seoul, South Korea - (KRT)

The U.S. government is preparing to smuggle tiny radios into North Korea as
part of a newly financed program to break down the country's isolation.

For the next four years, Washington will spend up to $2 million annually to
boost radio broadcasts toward North Korea and infiltrate mini-radios across
its borders.

North Korea, probably the most isolated country in the world, has only
radios that are rigged to capture broadcasts lionizing the nation's
Stalinist leadership. The broadcasts also blare from outdoor loudspeakers.

The American plan to smuggle small radios into North Korea is outlined in
the North Korean Human Rights Act, which President Bush signed into law Oct.
18.

The sweeping act provides money to private humanitarian groups to assist
defectors, extends refugee status to fleeing North Koreans and sets in
motion a plan to boost broadcasts to North Korea and get receivers into the
country.

North Korea's Kim Jong Il regime says the tiny radios will air "rotten
imperialist reactionary culture" to undermine the country.

The human rights act, in its broad scope, also has encountered opposition
from President Roh Moo-hyun, South Korea's center-left leader. Officials
under Roh say the act will stiffen Pyongyang's resistance to the outside
world and hinder already-stalled talks to get North Korea to abandon its
efforts to build a nuclear arsenal.

They scoff at the U.S. plan to smuggle in radios, saying it's a goodhearted
idea but one that will worsen the plight of North Koreans. Anyone captured
with a radio, they said, might face prison.

Supporters of the tactic argue that it offers a ray of hope to a populace
that's hungry for news amid food shortages and an acute humanitarian crisis.

"There's an incredible desire among North Korean people to know what's going
on," said Suzanne Scholte, the head of the Defense Forum Foundation, a
nonprofit group in Falls Church, Va., that focuses on American policy toward
North Korea.

A small number of clandestine radios are already in the country, sent in by
helium-filled balloons deployed by South Korean religious groups or brought
in by traders across North Korea's border with China.

"Some people listen to South Korean broadcasts under their blankets," said
Lee Gui-ok, a young North Korean mother who fled to China in 1999 and later
moved to Seoul.

Lee said the plan was worth carrying out - even if it endangered some
people - because it would offer hope to North Koreans that the outside world
cared about their situation.

"If they don't have radios, they can't listen to South Korean broadcasts. If
they had them, they would listen," Lee said.

A House of Representatives International Relations Committee report on the
human rights act says North Korea's radio broadcasts exalt ruler Kim Jong
Il, feed "paranoia about the threat of attack by the United States, and
misrepresent the conditions and standards of living that exist in the
outside world, particularly in South Korea."

The plan takes a cue from previous U.S. efforts in other parts of the world.
In 2001 and 2002, American diplomats in Havana, Cuba, passed out more than
1,000 short-wave radios so Cubans could tune in to the Florida-based
anti-Castro radio station Radio Marti. The radios were taken to Havana in
diplomatic pouches.

That wouldn't work in Pyongyang, because the United States and North Korea
don't have diplomatic relations.

How to smuggle the radios in remains to be worked out. Legislators may keep
operational details of the program classified to prevent North Korea from
countering them, said a Capitol Hill staff aide who's active in shaping U.S.
policy on North Korea, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"I don't see radios in balloons as particularly tenable," the staff aide
said. During most of the 1990s, the South Korean military deployed balloons
to send propaganda leaflets, rice and radios into North Korea, but suspended
the practice in late 1999 under then-President Kim Dae-jung's "sunshine
policy" of opening contacts with Pyongyang.

Since then, Seoul has sought to stop even private groups from airlifting
radios with balloons. In March 2003, police blocked a Korean-American pastor
from Artesia, Calif., Douglas E. Shin, as he and colleagues prepared to send
700 radios across the border slung from 22 helium-filled balloons.

"Everybody wants the radios," Shin said. "If a regular farmer or worker gets
caught, they get slapped on the hand, and the guy who confiscates it keeps
it because he wants to listen to it."

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/world/10167061.htm?1c



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