SEOUL, South Korea — Some send up plastic leaflets that weigh less than a feather and flutter down from the clouds with calls for democracy or blurry cartoons ridiculing North Korea’s ruler. Some send flash drives loaded with South Korean soap operas, or mini-documentaries about the vast wealth of Southern corporations, or crisp new U.S. dollar bills. One occasionally sends his empty food wrappers, stained labels showing noodles slathered in meat sauce, so Northerners can see the good life they’d find in the South.
They are self-proclaimed soldiers in a quiet war with North Korea, a disparate and colorful collection of activists taking on one of the world’s most isolated nations — mostly using homemade hot-air balloons.
To their critics in South Korea, they run quixotic and perhaps pointless campaigns. Some are scorned as little more than attention-hungry cranks who spend much of their time exchanging insults with the others.
But the activists look across the border and see a country they believe they are already reshaping.
“The quickest way to bring down the regime is to change people’s minds,” said Park Sang Hak, a refugee from the North who now runs the group Fighters for a Free North Korea from a small Seoul office, sending tens of thousands of plastic fliers across the border every year. Fearing retaliation by Pyongyang, he goes nowhere without police bodyguards. “People are already wondering about their lives there,” he said, with the spread of outside information letting them know that life is easier in China and South Korea.
Much of what the activists send — satirical cartoons, or teary soap operas awash in lost loves, curses and amnesia — doesn’t look dangerous at all. But scholars and North Korean refugees say the outside information has helped bring a wealth of changes, from new slang to changing fashions to increasing demand for consumer goods in the expanding market economy.