North Korea Founder's Memoir Triggers Censorship Debate In South

Goyang, South Korea, May 4 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th May, 2021 ) :A South Korean publisher's defiant move to release the memoirs of the North's founder Kim Il Sung has triggered a heated debate over Seoul's decades-old ban on Pyongyang's propaganda under national security laws.

Critics of the measure say Southerners are politically mature enough to judge such material for themselves and argue it amounts to unnecessary censorship in a vibrant democracy that is one of the most wired and educated countries in the world.

But the South remains officially at war with its nuclear-armed and impoverished neighbour, with legislation to match.

The national security law dates from 1948, before the outbreak of the Korean War, and still blocks ordinary citizens from accessing most North Korean-produced content, including its official Rodong Sinmun newspaper.

Reproducing or possessing banned pro-Pyongyang materials is punishable by up to seven years in prison.

Even so publisher Kim Seung-kyun in April released the North Korean founder's eight-volume memoirs, titled "With the Century", telling AFP he did so to promote inter-Korean reconciliation.

An anti-North civic group filed a criminal complaint, police launched an investigation and within days the country's major bookstores -- who had received it via a publishers' association -- pulled it from their shelves.

It briefly remained available online for 280,000 won ($250) for the full set, but by last week it was no longer available from popular web portal Naver, while searches on local bookselling platforms Kyobo and Yes24 showed no results.

The moves triggered a debate over censorship and whether people really needed to be protected from reading the words of Kim Il Sung.

"South Koreans already have a high level of judgement," said Ha Tae-keung, a lawmaker from the conservative People Power Party -- who was jailed under the national security law as a student activist.

"No one is going to be deceived by a fantasy-like memoir of Kim Il Sung anymore," he told AFP. "We now need to actively guarantee freedom of expression."