A move by South Korean opposition leaders to launch an independent probe of embattled President Yoon Suk Yeol over Seoul’s use of loudspeaker broadcasts into North Korea is raising questions among some U.S. experts about the future direction of Seoul’s approach toward Pyongyang.
Yoon, who was impeached and suspended from his duties last month for imposing emergency martial law on his unsuspecting country, was arrested Wednesday after a weeks-long standoff with investigators at the presidential compound.
Yoon, the first sitting president of South Korea to be under criminal investigation, faces a trial at the country’s Constitutional Court, which has the final say on whether he should be completely removed from his presidential responsibilities.
The country’s opposition Democratic Party, which holds a majority in parliament, and other smaller opposition parties introduced a revised bill last week to launch a special counsel investigation into Yoon’s alleged insurrection attempt during his short-lived declaration of martial law on Dec. 3, 2024.
The revised bill accuses Yoon of blasting loudspeaker broadcasts toward North Korea and sending propaganda leaflets to Pyongyang. They were cited as cases of provoking aggression from outside the country.
The South Korean Defense Ministry rejected the opposition’s allegations that the country’s military activities, including the use of loudspeakers, are intended to provoke North Korea.
“Our military has deterred North Korea’s provocations through a consistent policy toward North Korea while maintaining firm military readiness,” the ministry said Monday in a statement, adding that some people are “distorting the normal activities of our military.”
VOA Korean sought comment from the U.S. State Department on the latest controversy over South Korea’s information campaigns toward North Korea but did not receive a response.
However, a State Department spokesman said in an email on June 10, 2024, to VOA Korean that the United States supports the North Korean people’s right to access information from outside.
“We continue to promote the free flow of information into, out of, and within the DPRK [North Korea],” the spokesperson said, a day after the South Korean military resumed loudspeaker broadcasts on the inter-Korean border for the first time in six years in response to North Korea’s trash balloon offensive.
“It is critical for the people of North Korea to have access to independent information not controlled by the DPRK regime,” the spokesperson said.
Gittipong Paruchabutr, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told VOA Korean by phone Wednesday that loudspeaker broadcasts are “a low-risk, effective tool” for communicating with North Koreans.
“Absolutely, it’s a critical capability. It’s a low-risk capability that when we want to communicate to North Koreans, not just soldiers, but anybody within audio range. And I say low risk because it doesn’t really put Korean soldiers’ lives at risk,” Paruchabutr, who also served as chief of psychological operations for U.S. Forces Korea, said.
Paruchabutr added that in the past, South Korean loudspeaker broadcasts usually played K-pop songs and rebroadcasts of South Korean domestic news that included social topics promoting human rights, rather than information that “directly criticize North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his family.”
Controversy over accusation
Sydney Seiler, former national intelligence officer for North Korea at the National Intelligence Council, pointed out that the allegations that Yoon provoked North Korea’s aggression is a political claim that ignores the threats North Korea is posing to South Korea.
“The accusation that these are treason is ludicrous, nothing short of ludicrous,” Seiler said Tuesday by phone.
“This is a democratically elected government taking seriously its responsibilities for the national security of the Republic of Korea. This is not treason. This is just political maneuvering on the opposition parties’ part,” Seiler said, using the official name to refer to South Korea.
David Maxwell, vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy, said the opposition parties’ assertion stokes concerns of “an extreme naivete about the strategy of the Kim family regime.”
“This is really troubling. They are sending the message that they do not think South Korea should be sending information into North Korea. That’s fundamentally what they’re talking about,” Maxwell, a former U.S. Special Forces colonel, told VOA Korean by phone on Tuesday.
Others shared more cautious views, saying more details are needed before determining whether Yoon’s policy decisions were legitimate or not.
Evans Revere, a former acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, highlighted the need for an investigation.
“The idea of propaganda balloons going into North Korea. The idea of loudspeakers blasting music and news and propaganda into North Korea — that’s been going on for many years, and it hasn’t been regarded by most people as an attempt to instigate a conflict or a confrontation,” Revere told VOA Korean by phone on Tuesday.
“But now, the opposition is using that as one of the charges against [Yoon], and it needs to be looked into. It needs to be investigated,” Revere said.
“The question that’s probably weighing on the minds of a lot of policymakers in the United States right now is the question of whether there was some effort on the part of the Yoon administration to provoke a confrontation with North Korea. That’s a very serious charge,” he added.
Meanwhile, Bruce Klingner, senior research fellow for Northeast Asia at the Heritage Foundation, said South Korea’s Democratic Party’s criticism of the information warfare reflects its thinking on policy toward North Korea.
“The main impact will be that if a Democratic Party government came in as a result of a special election, the Democratic Party would indeed have very different foreign security policies, would be much more conciliatory, if not concessionary, towards China and North Korea,” Klingner said Tuesday by phone.
VOA’s Sangjin Cho contributed to this report.
