“The Ministry of Defense has suspended the Voice of Freedom broadcast as part of measures to reduce military tensions with North Korea,” ministry spokesman Lee Kyung-ho told reporters.
The Voice of Freedom, a frequency produced by the Ministry of Defense, had been reactivated in May 2010 after a North Korean attack sank the South Korean corvette Cheonan.
The suspension follows other measures implemented by President Lee Jae-myung’s government, which took office in June, to ease tensions on the peninsula.
The new Seoul administration has switched off border loudspeakers used for propaganda, while South Korea’s National Intelligence Service halted decades-old radio and television transmissions to the North in July.
Park Won-gon, a professor of North Korean studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said last week that Seoul’s only real bargaining power with the North is to cut propaganda broadcasts.
Last Wednesday, North Korea criticized what it described as Lee Jae-myung’s hypocrisy in speaking about the possible denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
Pyongyang stated that South Korea is the “only country that has surrendered all sovereignty to the United States,” according to an editorial published by the state-run KCNA news agency.
The agency, which conveys Pyongyang’s official position on national and international issues, lamented that Seoul continues to promote “empty illusions about denuclearization.”
It also reaffirmed that North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons.
“Lee must understand that continuing to feed this dream of denuclearization will help no one,” it said.
