Amidst the resumption of loudspeaker
propaganda targeting North Korean soldiers along the DMZ, a response to the North’s most recent nuclear test by the South Korean government, meetings have been held across Yanggang Province to discourage
anyone from defecting on account of “seductive broadcasting content.”
On the 17th, Daily NK spoke
with a source in Yanggang Province, who informed us that because the South
Korean loudspeakers are broadcasting messages to the North Korean people
propagating anti-government sentiment, inminban [people’s unit, or neighborhood watch] meetings took place
with the overt goal of “awakening the people to the falsity of the
messages being conveyed from the South.”
At the meeting the focus was on “crushing
the plot of the Park Geun Hye administration to encourage defection through the
broadcasts,” punctuated with a litany of lines about staying loyal to the homeland and the nation, according to the source.
This news was corroborated by an additional
source in a separate region of Yanggang Province, where inminban meetings in
the same vein have also been held.
“Even if
we somehow knew that the South had resumed its broadcasts, why are they making
exhausted people attend this kind of meeting? They’re just gathering us
together to inform us of a fact that we had no way of knowing anyway. They’ve already sealed off the borders with barbed wire and fences, so why make a fuss about it and tell people to not cross?” were among the sentiments shared with the source on the meetings by surrounding residents, who, on top of the other hardships their daily life presents, are particularly fatigued due to ongoing, compulsory compost [for use as fertilizer] quotas handed down by the authorities.
Following the meeting, most of the
attendees, their curiosity piqued about what exactly the contents of these
broadcasts could be to prompt a meeting, lollygagged to try to find out more.
Among them was the neighborhood resident everyone refers to as “the first to know everything.” He remarked that the authorities feared revealing details on the broadcasting
content from the loudspeakers during the meeting.
The source agreed with this assessment,
noting, “The authorities must be thinking that capitalist ideology might
be getting circulated up to the northern part of the country from those in the
South who can actually hear the broadcasts. Otherwise, there would be no reason
to hold a meeting of this nature all the way up in Yanggang Province,
which is so far from the DMZ that there is no way that anyone there could possibly
hear the broadcasts themselves.”
Then, before ending the call, he added, “Instead of looking at us and telling us not to defect, why don’t they help create a country that we wouldn’t want to escape from?”
