Liberation, a French daily, reports about the story of North Korean refugee Jung Gwang-il who sends Hollywood movies and Korean soap operas on USB sticks into North Korea via drones, on March 12.
“Create gradual change, the prelude to the radical turn that will sooner or later occur in North Korea.”
The French daily Liberation recently wrote about North Korean refugee Jung Gwang-il who sends drones into North Korea carrying USB sticks onto which have been saved non-Korea movies and Korean soap operas.
Under the headline “Jung Gwang-il veut libérer la Corée du Nord avec des clés USB" (Jung Gwang-il wants to liberate North Korea with USB sticks), the newspaper wrote about his life in the North and his life after escaping, on March 12.
After he fled North Korea, he established the NGO No Chains for North Korea, which has been sending many kinds of digital content into North Korea for eight years now. His aim is “to break the brainwashing and to show the North Koreans the difference between their lives and the outside world."
Liberation said, “There's no internet, or very little internet, and it’s not for the ordinary citizens. Access to information and to pop culture is his weapon against the dictatorship.”
The newspaper also wrote about his life and the way in which it was “made of repression and exile.”
Jung, born in 1963 in China, lost his father during the Cultural Revolution. His mother took her five children, including him, to North Korea. After serving in the North Korean army for 10 years, he traveled to China for the first time in 1995. There, he encountered South Korea’s TV shows and news programs, after which he started to doubt everything he learned about the North Korean system. In 1999, he was accused of espionage and underwent many hardships in the Yodok Prison Camp for four years, until his informant got arrested in 2003. He then escaped to China and eventually crossed the border into Cambodia. He then went to Thailand, and finally reached Seoul.
In 2013, he reported about the slavery he endured in the Yodok Prison Camp as part of a commission of inquiry by the United Nations.
After settling in South Korea, Jung realized how much people in the North lacked information. He started to send CDs and DVDs of movies and soap operas and passed them to smugglers and traders to spread them among North Korean residents. With the advance of technology, storage devices shrunk in size to USBs or micro-SD memory cards. These can be played with the Chinese media device Notel that is becoming more and more prevalent in North Korean homes.
As it became more and more difficult to pass media content through the merchants, Jung and his colleagues started using helicopter drones. They also diversified the range of content: North American or European documentaries and films, videos made by South Korean students and testimonies from other North Korean defectors.
Jung said his contacts in the North say that movies like “The Hunger Games” and “Mad Max” are popular there. He thinks that they are popular because they show dystopian societies, and people in the North see it as being in common with their lives.
“The way North Koreans see their own country and the rest of the world is changing,” said the newspaper Liberation. “The defectors will continue to send echoes from the outside world, with the certainty that no tyranny lasts forever.”
By Kim Young Shin Korea.net Staff Writer
Photo: Liberation
ysk1111@korea.kr