North Koreans once risked their lives to tune in. Now sil…

On Monday, South Korean authorities began dismantling the powerful loudspeakers used to pump out blaring music, news and anti-North Korea propaganda along the edge of the 155-mile demilitarised zone that separates the countries. It marks a turning point in a period of high tension between the two nations, which are still technically at war.

Seoul resumed its “loudspeaker war” in 2024 under former president Yoon Suk Yeol in response to Pyongyang launching hundreds of balloons filled with rubbish across the border. That had followed a wave of balloons sent by activists in the South filled with propaganda leaflets.

The loudspeaker broadcasts were stopped in June, shortly after Lee Jae Myung, South Korea’s new president, took office. Lee began his term pledging dialogue and economic cooperation with the North, and has made easing tensions with Pyongyang and Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s supreme leader, a top priority.

It’s a policy that doesn’t stop at the loudspeakers. For decades, South Korea – alongside other governments – has broadcast hundreds of hours of shortwave radio shows into the closed-off and heavily sanctioned North, accessible to those who dare find them.

These government-funded stations provide the type of news coverage that Kim doesn’t want his citizens to hear: uncensored reporting about his own regime, as well as world news told from an outsider’s perspective.

Now many of those radio stations have gone stone quiet. Critics say it’s exactly what Pyongyang wants.

At the start of this year, about a dozen stations based overseas broadcast on shortwave radio into North Korea. These included Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA), two services funded by the US federal government, and Voice of Freedom and Hanminjok Radio, run by South Korea’s defence ministry and the state broadcaster respectively. In March, Donald Trump signed an executive order to defund the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA and provides grants to RFA and other news outlets. Since then, the Korean services at both organisations have “gone dark”.

Then, in early July, four radio stations broadcasting hundreds of hours a day into North Korea went off air after the South Korean intelligence service suspended them, ending a 52-year practice of propaganda broadcasts that began in the 1970s.

Only a handful of broadcasters remain, including the BBC Korean service, which broadcasts two 15-minute programmes each day.

According to 38 North, a publication analysing data about North Korea run by US thinktank the Stimson Center, the result is that the number of hours of foreign radio programming broadcast into North Korea every day has fallen by almost 80% since May.

Robert King, former US special envoy for North Korean human rights, describes the cuts by both the US and South Korean administrations as a “disastrous decision”.

“This leaves North Koreans no alternative sources of information to the distorted and lying information provided by the Kim regime,” he says.

It is illegal to listen to anything other than state-run radio in North Korea. And it can be tricky: Pyongyang responds to state-funded foreign broadcasts by “radio jamming” – broadcasting noises to interfere with radio signals and interrupt programmes.

Song Byeok is a North Korean artist who defected to the South in 2002. He lived in Hwanghae province during the 1990s, when the North suffered from a severe famine, and worked as a propaganda artist, painting glorified posters of the country’s leaders and their achievements.

“I secretly listened to foreign [broadcasts] in the small hours of the morning,” he says. Song likens the programmes to “a ray of light” guiding him through those quiet, dark hours when he was struggling to control his mounting desperation or quiet his rumbling stomach: “Even in fear, I was listening.”

Broadcasters aren’t able to collect data about the number of people listening to foreign programmes inside North Korea. But a survey in 2022 carried out by RFA of 250 people who had recently defected from or travelled to North Korea found that all had listened to foreign radio stations. Four in 10 knew someone who had been caught listening to foreign broadcasts. The most common punishment described was being sent to a correctional labour camp, but several people reported executions.

“If you are caught listening to foreign broadcasts,” says Song, “you should prepare to be shot.”

“The new administration is more pro-engagement, and they don’t want to provoke the North Korean regime,” says defector Lee Hyun-Seung, now a lead strategist at the Global Peace Foundation, a US-based nonprofit.

Despite the reduction in radio broadcasts and the dismantling of the loudspeakers, Pyongyang doesn’t seem impressed by Lee’s conciliation attempts. According to the Korean Central News Agency, which is controlled by the state, Kim’s sister rejected the South’s overtures. Kim Yo Jong, who is a senior official of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, said the North had no interest in any policy or proposals for reconciliation.

The presidential office told Bloomberg in a statement that suspending radio broadcasts was better than witnessing inter-Korean ties deteriorate. South Korea’s defence ministry said that removing the loudspeakers was a “practical measure that can help ease inter-Korean tensions without affecting the military’s readiness posture”.

Seoul may come to regret the decision, warns Martyn Williams from the Stimson Center. Radio broadcasting provides the South with a direct link to the North Korean people, and should the political or military situation worsen, it is a powerful tool.

For the journalists, the cuts are a great loss. Park Jaewoo was a producer and reporter for the now-silent Korean service at RFA.

“People [in the country] that we spoke to all said they listened to our programmes, which made me very happy and proud,” says Park. “The regime in Pyongyang hated us … that means we speak the truth and our work is effective,” he says.

Photograph by South Korean Defence Ministry/AFP via Getty