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Last Sunday's Toronto Star(CN) published the following piece, written by Steven Borowiec(*):

South Korean security law takes aim at pro-North activists

When Kim Jong-il died in late 2011, videos of sobbing North Koreans sparked international discussion, as many questioned the sincerity of the theatrical crying.

While it’s impossible to know how North Koreans really feel about the regime in Pyongyang, there is no question about Hwang Seung-ho’s love for North Korea.

“The DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) is the only country that really takes care of its people and is a true democracy,” said 40-year-old Hwang, at a coffee shop in Bundang, a well-off suburb of Seoul. “All the people support one leadership and give their full-hearted support to one goal.”

Hwang isn’t a well-placed North Korean bureaucrat. As manager of Victims of the Korean National Security Law, he is part of a small but persistent community of pro-North activists in South Korea.

While North Koreans must appear invested in the system to avoid the heavy hand of the state, it is illegal to support North Korea in the South. Hwang’s home has been raided by police, who confiscated all his materials on North Korea, and he was fired from his last job as a math tutor for his political activities.

Under South Korea’s National Security Law (NSL), all kinds of people are being swept up, accused of pro-North activities.

On Jan. 31, South Korean authorities arrested Park Jeongguen for retweeting the message “Long live Kim Jong-il” from North Korea’s official Twitter account. Park is accused of helping “the enemy.” He has maintained he retweeted the message to mock North Korea.

“This is not a national security case, it’s a sad case of the South Korean authorities’ complete failure to understand sarcasm,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific director, in a statement.

Human rights groups have called for the law to be reformed or abolished, saying it is being used to stifle free speech and silence critics.

In 2007, 39 South Koreans were interrogated on suspicion of violating the law, according to the Los Angeles Times. That number had jumped to 151 by 2010.

The paper also reported that prosecutions for online postings perceived to be pro-North Korean also rose dramatically — from five in 2008 to 82 in 2010, according to the government’s statistics. And in the first 10 months of 2011, authorities deleted 67,300 Web posts deemed to be friendly toward North Korea, up from 14,430 in 2009.

To many, this increase in NLS cases appears as a regression to South Korea’s dictatorial past. Until the 1988 Seoul Olympics, South Korea was a military dictatorship. Following a long, bloody protest movement, it is now a functioning democracy. Ten years of liberal rule were broken with the 2008 inauguration of the Lee Myung-bak regime, under which Amnesty International and other groups have documented and voiced concerns over curtailed freedom of expression.

Despite the risks, there are activists who openly praise North Korea and want to reunite the Korean Peninsula under Pyongyang’s official ideology, known as juche.

“Throughout 60 years, North Korea has established and maintained the juche ideology and attained its current status as a superpower nation in regard to economy and military and our psychological and philosophical ways, so I admire the DPRK,” Hwang said.

Pro-North activist Kim Dae-hee echoes the North Korean line about the puppet status of South Korea.

“In South Korea we don’t have national sovereignty,” says Kim, who was arrested and sentenced to probation after attempting to hold a vigil commemorating Kim Jong-il on the day of the leader’s death.

“The DPRK has its own final say. In South Korea, we don’t have any power to get this country reunited without the interference of the United States. The United States doesn’t want to see this country reunited because it is against their interests,” said Kim.

The pro-North activists think highly of juche, which means “self-reliance” and is attributed to the country’s first leader Kim Il-sung, though it is said to have been ghostwritten by North Korean defector Hwang Jang-yeop.

“It (juche) is a sort of catch-all for everything the North Korean regime does,” said Brian Myers, a North Korea specialist at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea. “Anything they do they can point to and say ‘it’s juche’ and that gives it legitimacy. In reality it’s a red herring that distracts from the real ideology, which is something much more scary — a paranoid, race-based nationalism.”

In addressing pro-North activists’ attachment to the doctrine, Myers said, “The South Korean government’s treatment of juche as something seditious has given it a certain cachet. The South Korean nationalist left has a sort of uncomprehending attachment to it, which is understandable, since it’s very difficult for them to access materials from North Korea.”

In South Korea, it is difficult not to conform to social norms surrounding education, employment and family. Parents pressure their children to get into a good university, find a good job and marry. Those with unconventional goals or interests often report feelings of social exclusion or familial disapproval. The pro-North Korea activists are willing to accept this exclusion, however, to remain steadfast in their support for the North.

The conventional South Korean goals seem unimportant to Hwang. “In this country they just want Apple phones and other electronic devices,” he said. “They don’t want articulate, active citizens.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1132622--south-korean-security-law-takes-aim-at-pro-north-activists

* Steven Borowiec is deputy English editor for the ('left'-liberal) Hankyoreh newspaper, but he also writes for Yonhap...