Balloon-Borne Messages to North Korea Have Detractors on Both Sides of Border

 

IMJINGAK, SOUTH KOREA — On a pleasant spring day, with the wind breezing up from the south, the quirky little tourist outpost of Imjingak — with its Peace Land amusement park, some souvenir sheds and a Popeye’s chicken stand — hardly seemed like a possible flash point for violent hostilities between North and South Korea.

Imjingak, the site of a ferocious battle during the Korean War, has become a favored launching site for some of the South Korean activists who send propaganda balloons northward. The balloon campaign has so angered North Korea that its military has threatened — as recently as last Friday — to “mercilessly” shell Imjingak and other border towns if the launchings continue. North Korean artillery units are dug in a few kilometers away, just across the world’s most heavily militarized border.

It is flying season now, with robust winds blowing through the Korean Peninsula, and the activists are eager to get their balloons and leaflets in the air. Some of the balloonists are political agitators, others are Christian proselytizers, most are North Korean defectors. If the wind is at their backs, they say, millions of leaflets will be sent aloft in the coming weeks.

“North Korea has said they would fire surgical strikes at those of us sending up balloons, so this highly allergic reaction clearly shows what we’re doing is working,” said Park Sang-hak, 43, the son of a former North Korean spy who defected along with his family in 1999.

Mr. Park now heads Fighters for a Free North Korea, a human rights group in Seoul that has become the most aggressive balloon-launching outfit in the South.

Mr. Park and other balloonists do have their domestic political opponents, principally the organizations that seek a return to South Korea’s so-called sunshine policy, which favors a conciliatory approach to the North. Some of these groups occasionally try to sabotage the showier balloon events, and Mr. Park, who has had 24-hour police protection since 2008, once fired a tear gas pistol during a violent melee at Imjingak.

“We get threats against him quite often now,” said a plainclothes police officer who was guarding Mr. Park before a recent launching.

For much of the previous decade, the South Korean government tried to block the balloon launchings, which pushed the activists to work clandestinely. But the policy changed dramatically in the spring of last year after the sinking of a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, and the deaths of 46 sailors. The South has blamed a North Korean torpedo attack; the North says it was not involved.

“Previously we tried to persuade the balloon guys not to do anything because it badly affected inter-Korean relations,” said a senior official in the Unification Ministry, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to comment publicly on the matter. “But after the Cheonan, our position changed,” the official said. “We don’t block them now. It’s a matter we leave to the local police.”

Police officials have allowed the balloon launchings to continue at Imjingak — no special permit is necessary — and they intervene only if there is violence.

Mr. Park, an engaging and energetic man, honed his technique alongside Lee Min-bok, an evangelical Christian and the other leading figure in the balloon campaign. Beginning in 2003, looking for a way to poke the North Korean regime, they started out by tying a few handwritten leaflets to some tiny children’s balloons bought at a party store.

Once devoted colleagues, the men are now bitter rivals.

“I’m the original,” said Mr. Lee, who had been an agricultural scientist in North Korea. He said he fled in 1995 after his suggestions about economic reforms were not well received by his superiors.

His operation is financed by donations from churches and conservative Christians. He said he launched 1,500 balloons a year and accounted for 90 percent of all propaganda leaflets being sent into the North, about 250 million so far.

Mr. Lee, who uses various covert launching sites along the border, ridiculed Mr. Park’s launchings at Imjingak as little more than publicity stunts. He said the wind conditions were so unfavorable that Mr. Park’s balloons often ended up floating back into South Korea.

Mr. Park, for his part, called Mr. Lee “a Christian zealot” who was voted out of their secular group several years ago because he wanted to emphasize religion in their leaflets.

 

Text Messages Proliferate as Threats in Iraq

What Dr. Abdellah did not anticipate, though, was a barrage of one of this country’s more peculiar menaces: death threats by text message.

“I’ve been getting heaps of them,” he said recently in an interview in Baghdad, where he had fled to from the north after several kidnapping attempts. “Every single day.”

He estimated that he had received nearly 300 such threats since late February. They usually read, he said, “We are going to kill that, or we are going to burn that. Very rude language.”

One of the few that can be printed read, “If you come back to Erbil you will not see the blue sky again.”

Digital media have amplified the young voices of democracy ringing around the Middle East, but the flip side here is that the authorities and insurgents alike are also adept at using technology, particularly cellphones, largely unavailable here before the 2003 American invasion, as part of their arsenals of intimidation.

Actual violence may have declined substantially since the worst days of the war, but a culture of fear and intimidation still prevails. It has been on display during the intermittent protests that have rippled across Iraq in the wake of the regional uprisings. Death threats delivered by text message have become such a common experience across the spectrum of Iraq’s public-minded professions — lawyers, journalists, activists and government officials — that the two mobile phone companies, Zain and Asia Cell, have arrangements with the police and courts to investigate them.

“There is a great deal of cooperation between the security forces, the Iraqi judiciary and Zain with exchanging information,” said Mazin al-Asadi, a representative for Zain.

Yet most of the threats are untraceable, having been sent from throw-away phones and SIM cards bought on the black market.

“It’s impossible to count them,” said Abed al-Sattar al-Bairaqdar, the spokesman for Iraq’s Supreme Court.

Interviews with Iraqis suggest that the phenomenon cuts across all strata of society, but journalists in particular have been subject to such tactics, especially during the protests. And recent reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International about abuses by security forces have mentioned text-messaged death threats.

“It’s something we’ve noticed for a while now, and it’s pervasive throughout Iraq,” said Samer Muscati, a Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch who has recently visited Iraq. “But it seems it’s getting worse. Just about every protest organizer we’ve spoken with, and journalists, too, are getting these threats by phone and text.”

Mr. Muscati said it was common for journalists in Iraq to appear on television speaking about a controversial subject like corruption, and then, after the show, “they are barraged by these messages.”

Amnesty International, for example, reported that numerous journalists in the Kurdish region had received such messages, which the organization believes came from security officials who have taken part in attacks on news organizations. One, a correspondent for the satellite television channel KNN, affiliated with the Kurdish opposition party Goran, received a text message after reporting on work that Amnesty International has been doing in Iraq. The message told the reporter to stop his work. “Otherwise, the outcome will be disastrous,” the message read.

In the case of Dr. Abdellah, Kair al-Dain, the deputy police chief in Erbil, said he was aware of the doctor’s claims, but he would not comment more beyond saying that he had “no idea” whether Dr. Abdellah had indeed received intimidating messages.

The messages come in three basic varieties. Some are meant to intimidate, as in the case of Dr. Abdellah, who suspects that they came from the security officials who confiscated his cellphone when he was briefly imprisoned.

“They are very advanced in technology,” Dr. Abdellah said. “When you try to call the numbers, they are just disconnected.”

Yassir al-Jubori, 28, a journalist in Diyala, received a text message in February that read, “Your tongue has become too big, and it is time to cut it off.” He was told to quit his job.

“I remained for a few days in my house to be away from the insurgents,” Mr. Jubori said. “Day by day I got used to it and resumed my job, because I believe in fate.”

Other messages are mechanisms of blackmail and part of the kidnapping-for-ransom business that thrives here. Several of those interviewed said they received messages demanding payments to stay alive. One businessman in Kirkuk, who said he was kidnapped two years ago by the Sunni insurgent group Ansar al-Sunna because he had worked with the American military, recently received a text threat by the same group demanding $50,000.

“I didn’t pay them because the security situation has gotten better,” said the businessman, Faisal Hassan Khalaf. But he said he did not disregard the threat entirely. “I had to move away and change my vehicles because they can kill me whenever they want to. But at the same time, I can’t keep paying ransoms.”

At other times, the messages are tools of sectarian aggression.

Muhammed Abdul Naser, a 25-year-old student in Adhamiya, a Sunni neighborhood of Baghdad, once received a text that read: “We are the killers from the Mahdi Army. We know that you live close to the fish market. We will get you. We will get you.”

In one of the few instances in which the interviewees said the message was successfully traced, Mr. Naser said the cellphone company was able to locate the sender, who he said was indeed a member of the Mahdi Army, the now-disbanded Shiite militia loyal to the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

“I knew some people that were with the Mahdi Army,” Mr. Naser said, “and they went to him and asked him to leave me alone.”

In recent days, Dr. Abdellah said the Kurdish authorities demanded three things of him: that he stay off Facebook, refrain from news media interviews and leave Erbil.

He agreed only to the final demand — to protect his family members who live in Erbil — and spoke recently at a cafe in Baghdad on the evening before he left the country. He had just gotten a new cellphone, and was enjoying a respite from the steady flow of menacing words.

Dr. Abdellah said he was leaving the country for only a few weeks. “I’m not going to give up,” he said.

Omar al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from Baghdad, and employees of The New York Times from Baghdad, Kirkuk and Diyala, Iraq.