Voice of America has boosted its radio broadcasts into North Korea this year
by transmitting from Seoul with support from a South Korean president who
has taken a hard-line stance against the reclusive communist regime.
President Lee Myung-bak's administration is allowing the U.S.
government-funded broadcaster to use transmission equipment in South Korea
to send its dispatches into the North for the first time since the 1970s.
That makes the signal much clearer than VOA's long-running shortwave
broadcasts from far-flung stations in the Philippines, Thailand and the
South Pacific island of Saipan. Moreover, it's an AM signal, so listening in
doesn't require a shortwave radio.
"Radio can play a big role in changing people," said Kim Dae-sung, who fled
the North in 2000 and is now a reporter at Free North Korea Radio, a
shortwave radio broadcaster in Seoul. "Even if it's simply news, it's
something that North Koreans have never heard of."
Still, the move could be seen as yet more provocative policymaking by a
government already at loggerheads with the North over Lee's tough policy on
Pyongyang, and comes at a time of heightened regional tensions over North
Korea's plans to launch a rocket early next month. Nuclear envoys from South
Korea and Japan flew to Washington for talks Friday with top U.S. diplomats
about North Korea.
"North Korea will see this as meaning that the South's government is trying
to overthrow the regime by uniting strength with U.S. hard-liners," said
Paik Hak-soon, an analyst at the private Sejong Institute think tank outside
Seoul.
Information control buttresses North Korea's autocratic rule. Radios in the
country come with prefixed channels that receive only government signals
brimming with propaganda and praise for leader Kim Jong Il.
But some listen to outside broadcasts using radios smuggled in from China or
by removing the frequency jammers on their state-issued radios, despite the
risk of harsh punishment, including incarceration in North Korea's
notoriously grim political prison camps.
VOA, founded in 1942 with a broadcast in German, now has programs in 45
languages. During the Cold War, it targeted listeners in totalitarian
states. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has focused on countries
where radio and TV news is government-controlled and outside news sources
are banned.
Since Jan. 1, VOA has been using the antenna facilities of the Far East
Broadcasting Company-Korea, a Christian evangelical radio station, for half
of its three-hour nighttime broadcast into the North. The antenna is only 40
miles (65 kilometers) from the border.
"I think it's getting deeper into the North in better quality," said Park
Se-kyung, head of the Northeast Asian Broadcasting Institute, an association
of radio experts monitoring broadcasts in the region.
The broadcast is mainly news, with a focus on North Korea, such as its
ongoing nuclear standoff with the United States and other nations.
South Korea prohibited VOA from broadcasting from its soil for carrying a
1973 report on the kidnapping of Kim Dae-jung, then a leading South Korean
dissident. The authoritarian Seoul government at the time is widely believed
to have been behind the abduction.
Upon becoming president of democratic South Korea in 1998, Kim ushered in a
"sunshine policy" toward the North that called for cooperation and
engagement. The warming of relations won him the Nobel Peace Prize.
But President Lee has taken a far tougher line on North Korea since taking
office in February 2008, a stance that has opened the way for VOA to resume
transmissions from the South.
Some radio experts say VOA's arrangement with the Christian station violates
a South Korean ban on broadcasters relaying foreign signals.
But Kim Jung-tae, an official with the Korea Communications Commission,
justifies his agency's decision to allow the VOA broadcast on the grounds
that local networks are allowed to fill up to 20 percent of their airtime
with foreign programming.
Joan Mower, VOA's public relations director in Washington, D.C., described
the project as "a routine arrangement, similar to thousands of other
arrangements VOA has worldwide."
Broadcasting via South Korea helps VOA "expand its reach to audiences inside
North Korea," she said by e-mail.
Reporters Without Borders announced this week that the France-based media
watchdog group and the European Union will support three Seoul-based radio
stations targeting North Korea, including Free North Korea Radio, with about
400 million won ($290,000).
"These radios are one of the few hopes to create a real evolution in the
country. Without that, the North Koreans don't know what is going on in the
world and they don't know even what is going on in their own country," said
Vincent Brossel of Reporters Without Borders.
North Korea condemns such broadcasts as "U.S. psychological warfare" and
often jams the signals. So far, it has not interfered with VOA's new AM
broadcast, said radio expert Park. Doing so requires more equipment than
blocking shortwave signals, and the fact that North Korea isn't doing so may
indicate the North is struggling economically, he said.
Park said he supports the broadcasts.
"North Korean people have the right to information," he said. "Providing
correct information to people in a closed nation is what democratic nations
should do."
Associated Press writer Kwang-tae Kim contributed to this report.
(by Voice of America: http://www.voanews.com)
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