South Korea

Propaganda posted in helium balloons sparks border closure from N Korea

Sophie Team Observers — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:16:28 +0100

South Korean NGOs have been floating propaganda and money in helium balloons across the border for years. No secret to the authorities, so why did Kim Jong-Il's regime announce this morning that it will throttle the border and flush out Southerners?

Each containing 10,000 printed leaflets and a wad of bank notes laminated in plastic, the packages are tied up with string and attached to 10-metre-long balloons filled with helium. Their destination? North Korea, where popping one of the floating donations and distributing its contents is banned.

Since 2003, human rights activists have been using the unusual postal method to contact their divided state's northern counterparts. The contents of their message: world news, freedom literature and information about the North Korean regime.

Until recently the balloons were tolerated by the authorities, but at the start of October, Kim Jong Il's regime starting labelling the deliveries "psychological warfare". After weeks of threats from the Unification Ministry, it was announced on Monday that they would "strictly restrict" border crossings, "selectively expel" South Koreans and suspend an historic cross-border train tour.

Coincidentally, the change of tune comes just after the leaflets started to include information about the state of Kim Jong-Il's health; specifying that their "Dear Leader" has suffered a stroke and is soon to prove himself immortal...

The Olympics opening ceremony for all to see online

Sophie Team Observers — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:52:53 +0200

The organisers of the Beijing Olympics are furious after a South Korean TV channel broadcast excerpts of a rehearsal of the Games' opening ceremony. The video then found its way onto the Internet and became a huge hit, worsening the situation.

Over a week before the Games begin on 8 August and we already know what the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony will look like. The channel that aired the images, SBS, insists that it got hold of them legally. "We went there, nobody arrested us. So we filmed," said one its reporters. The video has already been removed from YouTube, but can still be found on other video sharing sites.

UPDATE (4 August 08 - 11am): the video has now also been removed from LiveLeak. You can find the video here.

Alleged communists massacred under the eyes of American soldiers

Sophie Team Observers — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:57:53 +0200

Last month the US government declassified images of thought-to-be communist sympathisers being massacred by South Korean authorities between 1950 and 1951. Tackling a sensitive subject, the evidence throws more weight behind the argument that the US were partly to blame.

The Korean conflict acted as a trigger for the Cold War. The country, rescued from Japanese control following World War II, was divided in half and shared between two rival regimes - the communist-supported northern side and the "free world"-supported southern side. To separate the two halves, a line was drawn along the 38^th Parallel north (circle of latitude), creating North Korea and South Korea. In 1949, South Korea created the National Guidance League (NGL), which recruited, by force, all suspected extreme left-leaning activists, in order to control any potential north-side sympathisers. Quotas were quickly set up for all NGL places to be filled, and to keep them at full capacity police forced thousands of farmers, many of them illiterate, to join the NGL, even though they had no link with the far left. Experts estimate that up until the North Korean invasion, the NGL recruited around 350,000 members.

When the north stormed its southern counterpart, marking the start of the war in June 1950, the southern authorities panicked. Fearing an insurrection from these hundreds of thousands of supposed left-leaning thinkers, the South Korean government ordered that they be got rid of. The members were massacred.

Mad cow scare: protests turn violent

Sophie Team Observers — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:43:17 +0200

Two weeks ago we published a post about the Internet-driven campaign in South Korea to boycott American beef imports because of fears of mad cow disease. Protests have since escalated in Seoul, where 60,000 demonstrators clashed with police at the weekend.

Protesters gathered in the square in front of the city hall, where riot police fired at them with water cannons. Around 300 were arrested during the strict police intervention (see video).

The campaign was launched in mid-May following a decision by the country's president to lift an embargo, in place since 2003, banning the import of American beef. Increasingly outrageous rumours began circulating, and Web users went as far as saying that even Alzheimer's could be transmitted from the "dangerous" meat. Read our post from the beginning of the crisis.

American beef causes Alzheimer’s, say South Korean Web users

Sophie Team Observers — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:37:28 +0200

A frenzy of South Korean Internet users has convinced the nation through Web postings and text messages that Americans were sending beef infected with mad cow — so dangerous that the Americans refused to eat it — to the country, mobilising thousands to protest. A blogger in the country explains why.

The rumours started when President Lee Myung-bak signed a deal in April with the United States to lift a ban on American imported beef, after it had been forbidden in 2003 following a outbreak of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The USA offered the country a sweeping free trade pact if they agreed to import the beef, worth 850 million US dollars (542 million euros) a year to the USA. An online campaign soon ensued in South Korea, warning shoppers that American beef was so dangerous that the Americans themselves were eating Australian and Canadian products and sending their own abroad. Children were advised not to go to school because of high contagion risks, and warnings given that mad cow disease was a cause of Alzheimer's.

The country's president of only three months, Lee Myung-bak, was blamed for supposedly giving in under US pressure over the agreement. This weekend, the frenzy reached its peak, with tens of thousands of people demonstrating with banners reading "Don't sell mad cow!" and "Out with Lee Myung-bak!" Faced with the objections, the South Korean government today announced that it would effectively ban imports of US beef from cattle older than 30 months.