The defectors whose airborne propaganda enraged North Korea
The 52-year-old is a member of an activist group for defectors calling themselves Fighters for Free North Korea, which carried out 12 such releases last year alone.
In their latest they sent half a million leaflets, 1,000 USB sticks and 50 booklets filled with content deemed subversive by the North for being derogatory to the country's leader, Kim Jong-un.
The leaflets describe Kim as a "hypocrite" who piles up private assets while allowing his people to starve and a "butcher" who ordered the assassination of his half-brother Kim Jong-nam in Malaysia in 2017. Also distributed among the bundles were 2,000 US$1 banknotes, which Park said would serve as an incentive for North Koreans to pick them up " despite the risks of getting caught and being punished for doing so.
Park Sang-hak scatters anti-North Korean leaflets as he speaks to the media from the roof of a car in 2012. Photo: Reuters alt=Park Sang-hak scatters anti-North Korean leaflets as he speaks to the media from the roof of a car in 2012. Photo: Reuters
Park's brother Jeong-o leads a similar anti-Pyongyang propaganda campaign, though his is seaborne " with plastic bottles containing leaflets and some rice released into the sea near the border, in the hopes that the current carries them north.
The Park brothers and their supporters are not without their critics in the South " even among fellow defectors who also launch leaflet-carrying balloons across the border.
Lee Min-bok pioneered technology in 2003 that allowed him to do so through the use of a time-trigger device, and though the born-again Christian evangelist used to work with Park Sang-hak, he broke ranks with him over his alleged propensity for "media stunts".
"Park has become addicted to the donations that come with leaflet launches. It's like a drug for him," Lee said, accusing him of "exorbitantly" inflating costs " a charge Park angrily denied.
Park Sang-hak holds a balloon containing leaflets denouncing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un near the border between the two Koreas in 2016. Photo: Reuters alt=Park Sang-hak holds a balloon containing leaflets denouncing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un near the border between the two Koreas in 2016. Photo: Reuters
Lee continues to send millions of leaflets across the border to North Korea every year from the three-tonne truck equipped with hydrogen tanks that he designed, though he eschews the provocative content and televised launches Park has favoured in the past.
Activists' leaflet launches are designed to penetrate the information blackout created by North Korea's tightly controlled state media and restrictions on personal freedoms, in the hope that they can help dismantle some of the cult of personality that surrounds the country's leadership.
They have long irked Pyongyang and are a source of concern for many South Koreans, especially those living near the border who remember a 2014 incident when the North's military fired at a balloon release, causing bullets to land in the South.
"We understand defectors' stance but their moves only make our life harder", said Lee Gil-yeon, head of a farmers' association in the border province of Gyeonggi.
Kim Yo-jong pictured with her brother North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the signing of an inter-Korean agreement in 2018. Photo: AP alt=Kim Yo-jong pictured with her brother North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the signing of an inter-Korean agreement in 2018. Photo: AP
North Korealast week cut off communication links set up two years ago with Seoul, which it accused of allowing hostile acts by failing to stop the activists' balloon releases, and on Tuesday blew up an inter-Korean liaison office in the country's border city of Kaesong. It followed comments last Saturday from Kim's sister and adviser Kim Yo-jong, who said it was "high time" to break with the South, calling it an "enemy".
Many of the balloons released by activists in South Korea fail to make it out of the country's airspace, while Park Jeong-o's plastic bottles often wash back up on the South's coast, getting entangled in fishing nets and littering the shoreline.
Even if they do make it to their intended destination, Hong Gang-cheol " another defector who operates a YouTube channel specialising in North Korea-related news " said the leaflet campaigns were backfiring by alienating North Koreans as no one would "like to see their leaders' dignity being sullied by foreigners [and] this is the same with the North".
Accusing the Park brothers of treating their leaflet campaigns "as rather like a family business that brings them money", he also questioned the logic of including food in the bundles, asking "if you find a piece of cake left by someone at your door, would you eat it?"
Park Sang-hak dismissed Hong's main charge, pointing to the death threats he had repeatedly received. "We are risking our own lives doing this. How could it be a business?", he said, adding that he was being financed by an innumerable number of small donors, many of them living abroad.
Kim Seong-min, a fellow defector who operates a radio station broadcasting towards the North, said many of his compatriots who had made the difficult journey to the South consider Park a hero, "as he is doing what they can't do themselves".
Nevertheless, his actions and those of activists like him have been the primary motivation given for Pyongyang's recent retaliatory actions, with the South's Unification Ministry filing complaints against Park and pushing for a new law that would ban leaflet launches outright in an apparent bid to defuse the crisis.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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