Abstract
South Koreans who try and get in touch with their North Korean family can face prison for making contact,
While in South Korea there is near constant chatter about how relations with North Korea’s government are improving, when it comes to South Koreans’ ability to communicate across the border, the old strictures remain in place.
But pressure on the government of President Moon Jae-in is growing.
Later this year, Minbyun – Lawyers for a Democratic Society, one of South Korea’s most prominent civic groups, plans to organise a series of lectures and cultural events across South Korea under the title, I’m a victim of the National Security Law, where people who have been jailed or harassed by the government for their comments on North Korea speak publicly about their experiences.
Chae Hee-joon, a lawyer from Minbyun, told Index: “Under the [President] Moon Jae-in government, the number of cases of people being penalised for violations of the National Security Law has decreased, but the law’s chilling effect on people’s freedoms of thought, consciousness and expression has remained the same.”
The law first came into effect when the Korean peninsula was on the brink of war. Under the law, people have gone to prison for actions as simple as owning North Korean literature or speaking favourably of the North’s ruling dynasty.
Kwon Oh-huen, a slight, softly-spoken man in his 70s, has been coming to the Thursday protest meetings in central Seoul for decades. He takes the microphone to call for the release of 12 prisoners currently serving time for the crime of praising North Korea. Kwon and other opponents of the law argue that the law uses too vague a definition of what constitutes “praise”, and that it is an unjust infringement on freedom of expression.
“Our government must guarantee freedom of conscience,” Kwon told Index. “If we lock up even one person for their beliefs, that means our society is barbaric.”
The 250-kilometre border that separates north and south has only one active crossing, which is heavily guarded by the military on both sides. Tall barbed wire fences run along the border everywhere else.
If a South Korean citizen wishes to send a letter or make a phone call to someone in North Korea, they first must seek permission from their government. If a South Korean national happens to meet a North Korean citizen while travelling overseas they are required to report that activity back to their government immediately. Failure to take these steps can lead to charges of having violated the National Security Law.
The ostensible purpose of these controls is to prevent infiltration of North Korean spies into South Korea, and to prevent South Korean nationals from acting as aides or informants to those spies.
Kwon has direct experience with the law. In 2014, his home was raided and he was investigated after he said at one of the weekly protests that the late North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il, was someone who performed “good deeds” for the Korean people. It wasn’t his first brush with the law. In the early 1970s, he spent three and a half years in prison for taking part in violent rallies against the military dictatorship that ran South Korea at the time.
Born in 1937, in a mountainous province south of Seoul, Kwon’s parents died when he was in his teens, and he moved to the capital. He found companionship in the city’s community of left-wing activists who resisted the US-allied South Korean government of the time, and longed for unification with the North.
When he is not being called a “commie” and a pro-North Korea stooge in the South Korean media, Kwon is sometimes called a “lifelong youth” for remaining dedicated to activism into his old age.
Beyond seeking changes to particular laws, Kwon sees his mission as spreading understanding. “Koreans in the south and north don’t really have different ideologies. We’re all one people: it’s politics that divides us. If we were able to talk directly and share information we could come to understand each other better.”
Most South Koreans with family in the north have, over the decades of division, lost contact with their relatives. For defectors who now live in the south, there are the impediments of South Korean law to overcome as well as North Korea’s own strict controls.
“The reality is that, for the majority of North Koreans who leave for places like South Korea, the UK and Japan, contact with family they leave behind is costly, unreliable, and sporadic,” said Markus Bell, a lecturer in Korean and Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield.
Those who can afford it seek help in the black market of merchants and fixers who do business in and around North Korea. “Many of the North Koreans I worked with in Japan and in South Korea were able to speak with, and send money to, their families through informal, illegal networks of middlemen, working in the borderlands of places like Yanji, China,” Bell said.
North Korean-born poet Lee Ka-yeon tackles this inability to keep in touch in her award-winning 2015 collection “Waiting for Mom”. Lee says that when she fled North Korea in 2010, she did so without informing anyone, even her immediate family, because of the fear that word of her plan would get around and she could be arrested before departing. She now lives in Seoul and says she has had no contact with her family in the years since.
Unlike some North Korean-born writers, her work does not feature shrill criticism of the regime. Instead, her writing mulls over the emotional pain of separation from loved ones.
“I don’t even know if my mom is still alive,” Lee said in an interview. “I wish I could just ask her simple things, like how her health is, if she’s eating well.”
Kwon says he hopes the division of the Koreas won’t last and that the South Korean government will ease limitations on interaction between South and North Koreans, paving the way for eventual reunification.
“To really achieve peace, we have to be able to communicate,” he said.
A military fence separates a young South Korean girl from North Korea as she gazes into the distance at Imjingak park, south of the Military Demarcation Line and Demilitarised Zone (DMZ). South Korean families divided during the Korean War visit the DMZ to pray for their relatives in the North, most often on the occasion of the Lunar New Year
CREDIT: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty
