[Besides Trump’s address, the USB sticks also hold YouTube videos showing what life is like for young people in the United States, as well as the movies “The Wall,” an Irish movie about a North Korean poet, and “The Interview,: the comedy about assassinating Kim Jong Un that is believed to have led North Korean hackers to attack Sony Pictures in 2014.]
By Anna Fifield
 |
|
Volunteers
carry sacks filled with bottles down to the edge of the Han River,
ready
to cast them into the currents and — hopefully — send them to
North
Korea, in Ganghwa Island, South Korea on April 16, 2018.
(Anna
Fifield/The Washington Post)
|
GANGHWA
ISLAND, South Korea — The water bottles, filled with rice and worm
medicine and ointment and USB sticks containing movies and songs and President
Trump’s State of the Union address, were carried away by the currents. Their
destination: North Korea.
Twice a month when the tides are right,
activists led by Jung Gwang-il, a former North Korean political prisoner turned
human rights advocate, toss hundreds of bottles into the Han River to be
carried downstream in the hope that some will end up in the hands of North
Koreans, who are hungry for both food and information.
“I want people in North Korea to know that
even the president of the United States is concerned about human rights,” Jung
said as he prepared to cast 400 more bottles into the river. “I want to
encourage them to stay the course against North Korean regime.”
The USB sticks in these bottles contained
subtitled footage of Trump’s January address, in which the president called
North Korea’s dictatorship “cruel” and “depraved.”
Jung, who met Trump in the Oval Office in
January and has a picture of the two of them together on his South Korean
messaging app profile, supports the president’s “maximum pressure” approach to
dealing with Kim Jong Un.
Through his organization, No Chain for North
Korea, he’s trying to apply his own form of pressure on the Kim regime by
breaking the information blockade.
Besides Trump’s address, the USB sticks also
hold YouTube videos showing what life is like for young people in the United
States, as well as the movies “The Wall,” an Irish movie about a North Korean
poet, and “The Interview,: the comedy about assassinating Kim Jong Un that is
believed to have led North Korean hackers to attack Sony Pictures in 2014.
Jung also loaded footage of a North Korean
musical group’s performance in Seoul in February — to show that they were
performing songs that are banned in the North — and the performance that South
Korean singers gave in Pyongyang last month. Both were heavily censored in the
North.
North Korea’s Kim family has remained in
power for seven decades partly by shutting off all information from the outside
world, instead telling the impoverished and oppressed citizens that they live
in a socialist paradise.
But as information has seeped in on radio
waves and cellphones and USB sticks, more and more people have come to realize
that this is a lie.
Thae Yong Ho, who was North Korea’s deputy
ambassador in London until his dramatic escape in 2016, says that getting
information into the country is crucial to counteract the state’s propaganda.
“We should educate the North Korean people so
that they can have their own ‘Korean Spring,’ ”
he told The Washington Post last year.
Dealing in outside media has become big
business in North Korea, with merchants in the markets selling USB drives that
can be inserted into TVs or DVD players, and micro-SD cards that can be put
into phones.
A 2015 survey of people who had escaped from
North Korea found that 81 percent had watched foreign media on USB drives while
still in the country.
Jung and other activists have, over recent
years, become increasingly ingenious at getting information into the country.
Some set up radio stations in which escapees from North Korea talk about their
lives in the South. Some fly huge balloons filled with brochures and media
across the border from South Korea when the winds are right. Others smuggle
bags of DVDs over the border from China.
Jung tried drone delivery at one point, but
that was tricky. So he went low-tech, relying on the river currents to wash
bottles of information ashore.
Jung doesn’t have proof that North Koreans
watch the movies or eat the rice he sends, but the Marine Corps has told him
that they’ve seen people and boats collecting the bottles.
On a recent day, as the government in Seoul
was preparing to host a summit between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Jung and his team headed out to a secluded
spot on the banks of the Han.
His work is sensitive — and not just because
the North Korean regime objects to it. The South Korean government is concerned
that such activities might antagonize the regime at a time when it’s trying to
make diplomatic progress.
No Chain gets no government funding, relying
instead on donations. The Human Rights Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit
organization, donates USBs as part of its “Flashdrives for Freedom” project,
which aims to penetrate isolated places.
Student groups at Yale and the University of
Alabama have donated USB drives, as has a high school in Wyoming. Sometimes
individual donors in the United States and South Korea send old USBs, too.
The three pounds of rice in each bottle,
donated by South Korean churches, is worth about two months’ salary for a state
worker in North Korea.
Lee Hae-kyung, who worked as a pharmacist at
a hospital in North Korea, had come to the river bank bringing with him
antiseptic ointment and worming tablets to counteract parasites — like the ones
that riddled the soldier who escaped across the border to the south last year.
When she lived in North Korea, she said,
people were told that such supplies from the south were poisoned. “But now
North Korean people know that it’s not.”
[Kim Jong Un’s North Korea: Life inside the
totalitarian state]
“Change doesn’t happen when people are
hungry,” said Lee Soon-shil, who escaped from North Korea a decade ago. “So
when they find these bottles, they can cure their hunger and learn about South
Korea at the same time. I think the USBs are going to be a bigger help than the
rice itself.”
With the bottles all ready and noon
approaching — the best time to hit the right currents — the activists and
several dozen members of a church group that had donated the rice gathered on
the rocks overlooking the Han.
They prayed loudly together. “Lord please
work for us,” they chanted. Then they started flinging the bottles into the
water.
“People in North Korea will be swarming
around these at dawn tomorrow,” said Kim Yong-hwa, the chairman of the North
Korean Refugees Human Rights Association, another group involved in the effort.
While Moon was talking about guaranteeing the
future of the North Korean regime as part of the effort to persuade Pyongyang
to give up its nuclear weapons, the activists were trying to care for the North
Korean people by feeding and educating them, Kim said.
That could pay different security dividends,
he said. “We think that the people who receive this rice are going to be on our
side. They’re not going to want to attack us.”
The currents carried the bottles away, to
drift possibly as far as 25 miles. Whether they arrived, the activists didn’t
know. But they had to try.
Min Joo Kim contributed to this report.
Read
more:
