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A crucial pillar of regime control in the North is information. The core objectives of information control are two: to offer up a shining portrait of the North; and to denigrate the rest of the world, and particularly the South. A typical day at KCNA contains a number of stories on the South that portray it as dark and dangerous. On March 12, for example, these stories included two on repression of students (that one is particularly rich), two on conflicts between the government and opposition over strategy toward the alliance and North, one on the staging of chemical weapons drills and one on a forest fire.
But even the regime recognizes that its word may not be as authoritative as that of a third party: this is the crucial difference between advertising and PR. What better voice than the prodigal son or daughter who fell from grace but has returned? Thus the political theater of the re-defector press conference.
In a terrific piece for the Korea Economic Institute, Christopher Green, Steven Denney, and Brian Gleason theorize and provide an overview of this new twist in the North Korean propaganda wars. The first of these re-defector press conferences involved an elderly woman named Pak Jong-suk on June 28, 2012, but they provide information on six others since that time, neatly summarized in a table in the Appendix. Each followed a tightly-managed script: “treacherous South Korean intelligence agents lured them to defect via subterfuge and manipulation; they endured a miserable life within the South’s capitalist system; they longed to return to life in the North; and ultimately the Supreme Leader generously welcomed them back home despite their betrayal.” This last element is crucial to the near-religious nature of the whole exercise: redemption is always possible (although with some agony imposed; the route to redemption passes through the country’s sprawling penal system).
As Green, Denney and Gleason note, this strategy is laced with various risks. First, it acknowledges openly that people are indeed leaving. Second, it has to confront the problem that some North Koreans know—via other media—that South Korea is in fact richer. This second problem is handled by hammering the discrimination and difficulties faced by North Korean refugees in the South, not without a grain of truth. But Green, Denney and Gleason point out that most North Koreans still don’t have such points of reference. In a clever strategy, they interview a handful of defectors on the press conferences and find that many believe they are indeed effective because their compatriots don’t know any better. An obvious implication of their study: the Haggard-Noland mantra of “get people—and information in; get people—and information—out.”
