07:36
Tieng Anh Vui
BY ALMOST any measure, South Korea is a thriving liberal democracy. It has held free and fair elections since 1987. Raucous, if peaceable, protests routinely fill its streets. But one measure is far from liberal: its National Security Law punishes, with up to seven years in prison, anyone who praises the gangster regime to the north. The law was adopted in 1948 to safeguard the new country from communist infiltration from North Korea. Under Park Geun-hye, the country’s conservative president who took office in 2013, 119 were arrested on suspicion of breaking the law in her first year. The continued use of such draconian powers has prompted calls from the UN to abolish them.
South Korea is still technically at war with the North, six decades after an armistice was signed. Many conservatives say that, given the unpredictability of the regime of Kim Jong Un, the law’s continued use is justified. In a new-year address this week, Ms Park described it as “an essential law that ensures minimum security in the case of a unique weakness”.
Fresh instances continue to justify it, say its supporters. Last year Lee Seok-ki, a member of the United Progressive Party (UPP), a minor hard-left grouping, was sentenced to 12 years in prison on charges of plotting a pro-North rebellion to overthrow the government. In December the constitutional court disbanded the UPP, stripping its five other MPs of their seats in the National Assembly. The order was the first of its kind since 1958, when the South was in effect a dictatorship.
Ms Park greeted the judgment as a “historic decision that strongly protects liberal democracy”. Few true progressives have any sympathy for Mr Lee’s nastier views; he helped rig his own party’s elections and tried to purloin confidential military documents. Yet it is hard to see how he poses a real threat to national security either. And the UPP was one of the few political groups actively promoting peaceful reunification—supposedly a national tenet.
The triumph of vigilance over free speech has tended to damage the cause of the South’s real progressives. They are often vilified as jongbuk, or pro-North sympathisers, for opposing the conservative order. Last week an American born in South Korea, Shin Eun-mi, was deported for allegedly praising North Korea during a lecture tour about her visits there. She riled conservatives by saying that North Korea’s beer tasted good, that its rivers were clean and that its people were warm-hearted—hardly controversial propositions to most visitors to the North. Though Ms Shin claims no political motive, she was joined on her tour by Hwang Sun, a former leftist politician who gained notoriety for giving birth by Caesarean section in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, on the anniversary of the founding of its Workers’ Party. Ms Hwang was arrested this week for praising the North Korean regime.
Ms Shin’s travelogue was even listed as recommended reading by the South’s ministry of culture as recently as 2013. It is now being removed from libraries. At times her views on the North come across as naive. Yet such accounts also help to show a more human, even humdrum, side to the North Korean monolith than most South Koreans hear about.
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