South Korea’s new plan for North Korea’s “freedom”

Every year on August 15, South Korea observes a holiday to commemorate the day the Korean peninsula was liberated from Japanese colonial rule. On this day, South Korean presidents traditionally set out their vision for Korean unification – Korea has been divided between North and South since 1945.

But the country's current president, Yoon Suk Yeol, proposed a new approach this year. Rather than emphasizing “peaceful unification” with North Korea, as many previous presidents have done, Yoon's vision puts “freedom” at the center of South Korea's unification efforts.

In his speech, Yoon outlined the tasks he considers crucial to achieving a unified Korea, including the “need to change the mindset of the North Korean people so that they fervently desire unification based on freedom.” Simply put, this means promoting North Koreans' freedom to access information from the outside world.

This approach suggests that the South Korean government will continue its policy of restraint toward activists who have been sending balloons filled with leaflets criticizing the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un across the border for months.

Yoon's government has failed to intervene in the activities of these activists, who are mostly North Korean defectors, even citing a 2023 Constitutional Court ruling that declared these actions protected by freedom of expression.

At the same time, Yoon will seek to preserve the values ​​that make South Korea a “free” nation and make them the guiding principles of a unified Korea. These include liberal democracy, a free market economy and respect for human rights.

There has been no reaction from the North to Yoon's announcement so far. The North's silence is quite unusual, as Pyongyang almost always reacts immediately to Seoul's unification proposals – and negatively.

What South Korea wants

Seoul is pursuing two goals. First, it hopes that access to information from abroad could lead to more North Koreans wanting to live in the South, which in turn would increase the number of attempts to escape across the border.

The number of successful defectors has dropped significantly since 2020, after North Korea sealed its borders during the pandemic. But after border controls were relaxed again in 2023, the annual number of defectors making it to the South almost tripled to 196.

Recently, on August 20, Seoul's military announced that it had apprehended a North Korean soldier who had crossed the border, the second defector in two weeks.

In addition, Seoul fears that a flow of information could lead to a popular uprising in the North. Such an uprising could put pressure on the regime to either give in and grant its people more freedom and human rights or collapse.

But these scenarios are unlikely to become reality. After all, Pyongyang's regime ensured its survival primarily because it kept information from abroad under strict control.

Seoul's new vision of reunification is provocative and unlikely to go down well in Pyongyang. It could even endanger the lives of ordinary North Koreans by encouraging Kim's regime to tighten its information control.

Yoon's commitment to developing a new vision for Korean reunification dates back several months. In March, the South Korean presidential office announced its intention to update the Community's National Unification Formula, which has been the government's official reunification policy since 1994.

The formula consists of three phases: seeking reconciliation and cooperation with the North, establishing a Korean Commonwealth, and finally creating a unified, unified Korea.

Although the exact nature of the update is not yet clear, the decision to revise the existing unification formula is not surprising. There has been no progress beyond the first stage since the formula was introduced three decades ago.

Seoul's decision to review and update its unification formula also came after Kim reportedly gave up hopes of unification in January. In a speech to North Korea's parliament, he said the constitution must be amended to designate the South as the “main enemy.”

Retaliation from the North

The main goal of a freedom-based unification – to give ordinary North Koreans greater access to information from the outside world – is something Kim's regime vehemently opposes.

Information control has been one of North Korea's top priorities for decades and will continue to be so. North Korea's increasing consumption of foreign media, particularly K-pop music and K-drama television shows, has already led to several public executions.

So retaliation against Seoul's freedom-based attempts at unification is to be expected. North Korea has already sent hundreds of balloons filled with excrement and garbage to South Korea in response to the leaflets. And in June, Kim's sister Kim Yo-jong threatened further retaliation if they continued, saying South Korea must “be prepared to pay a cruel and heavy price.”

From North Korea's perspective, any attempt to send leaflets containing information from outside represents a direct threat to the stability of the regime.

Freedom of expression and access to information are important universal values ​​that must be protected at all times. But a provocation by Kim's regime could put lives at risk by triggering an even more repressive crackdown on the people of North Korea.

For this reason, Seoul's pursuit of unification based on freedom may be difficult to convey to the North Korean people.

Peter Han is a PhD candidate in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.