Meet the North Korean defectors enraging Kim Jong-un with leaflet balloons

Fighters for Free North Korea vows to keep sending informational leaflets for as long as Kim Jong-Un threatens the South with nuclear arms, as Donald Kirk reports

Park Sang-hak launches balloons toward North Korea (AP)

North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, is not giving up his nuclear warheads, and a pair of brothers who defected from the North 20 years ago refuse to stop bothering him with news items blown his way by balloons.

“The police are trying to find any clue as to whether we committed an illegal action,” the younger brother, Park Jung-oh, 51, tells The Independent. “They keep asking, ‘What are you doing here?’ It is very difficult to answer all their questions.”

Nonetheless, he and his older brother, Park Sang-hak, 52, both of whom defected from North Korea via China 20 years ago, promise to keep up their campaign regardless of the risks.

“As long as Kim continues to threaten South Korea with nuclear arms, we will continue to send leaflets,” says Park Sang-hak. 

It’s a standoff from which neither is likely to back down despite efforts of South Korea’s president Moon Jae-in to reconcile with Kim, while forcing the brothers to stop jeopardising all attempts at dialogue by firing off those annoying leaflets.

A look at the latest utterances from Kim and the Park brothers offer some striking contrasts – and similarities.

Kim has said he won’t consider “military action” against South Korea and is not going to bombard the South with 12 million leaflets as planned. Park Sang-hak, who leads a group called Fighters for Free North Korea, is vowing to fire off another half a million leaflets into North Korea, saying he’s not worried about going to jail for violating the orders of the Moon government.

“There are forces who want to put me into jail, but going to jail in this heat is not bad,” he tells The Independent. At least, he says, “it would be cool in there”. And, no matter what, “we will continue to send leaflets and tell the truth.”

One truth that the brothers want told is the origin of the Korean War some 70 years ago, on 25 June 1950, when Kim Jong-un’s grandfather ordered the invasion of the South. “North Koreans are forced to believe the US started the war,” says Park Jung-oh. “We try to write who actually started it. We only tell the facts. Kim Jong-un is mad because the leaflets are critical of him.”

The saddest truth that Kim does not want his people to hear, says Park Sang-hak, is the news that he had ordered the assassination of his older half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, in the international airport in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur more than three years ago. “The Devil Kim Jong-un Has Murdered his Own Blood Brother,” read the headline in the leaflet that Park believes Kim found most upsetting.

“If you think about North Koreans killing your own blood, this is something North Koreans can’t even imagine,” says Park Sang-hak, speaking via an interpreter. “Defectors understand the killing of about 480 high-level officials on Kim’s orders, but they can’t believe he would have assassinated his brother.”

What Kim could not believe, if the reports reaching Park Sang-hak from inside North Korea are credible, is that leaflets carrying that news were fired with such accuracy that they drifted down on his entourage while he was enjoying the hot springs at a resort that he opened last year in the mountains east of Pyongyang.

“He said this was a resort for the people, but he had built his own summer house there,” says Park Sang-hak.

One look at one of those leaflets, though, was enough to spoil the holiday. “His mood turned bad,” he says. “It unnerved him. He was supposed to stay two more days but returned immediately to Wonsan,” the port city down the east coast where he lives in splendour in a sprawling compound near another resort area that he’s having built.

North Korean defector Park Sang-hak, the head of Fighters for a Free North Korea (EPA)

It was after seeing those leaflets that Kim’s younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, his de facto deputy, attacked those sending the leaflets as “human scum” and “mongrel dogs” while ordering “the department in charge of affairs with the enemy to decisively carry out the next action.” Not long afterward, the North Korean military blew up the luxurious new liaison office inside the abandoned industrial complex on the North Korean side of the line where Moon had fantasized North and South Koreans talking over issues large and small.

Now Moon is hastening to make amends, to jump-start the dialogue, to get on Kim’s good side if that’s still possible.

Seoul has said firing leaflets into North Korea violates an agreement reached between Moon and Kim on inter-Korean cooperation. The newly appointed unification minister, Lee In-young, a firebrand leftist activist as a student combatting former military-led governments in South Korea, says flatly, “any acts that could cause military tensions are never desirable under any circumstances.”

South Korea participates in military exercises near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) (EPA)

To which Fighters for Free North Korea responds: “Moon Jae-in’s pro-North administration [is] against free democracy and freedom of speech for the people.”

More charitably, Park Sang-hak believes that South Korea now “is mired in the Stockholm syndrome” – an allusion to the strange affection that those who are abused may get for those responsible for abusing them.

“Some media have belittled our leaflets saying they are mostly porn,” he says.

In fact, he says, another group unknown to him had fired off leaflets seven years ago smearing Kim Jong Un’s wife, but his group had focused only on Kim’s brutal rule.

While looking forward to firing barrage of balloons laden with leaflets, younger brother Park Jung-oh says he had agreed to one concession. He put off floating plastic bottles filled with rice, catching currents that carry them to North Korea, after authorities convinced him that local residents feared reprisals – but he promises to resume when he gets a chance.

“We are sending them rice to help the North Koreans,” he says. “We are sending them a piece of our hearts, but the government only listens to Kim Yo Jong and Kim Jong-un.”