North Koreans once risked their lives to tune in. Now silence reigns

For decades, people have dared to listen to uncensored foreign radio in a country where that is illegal ... until US cuts and politics in Seoul snatched the chance away from them.

- By Nga Pham in Taipei

For the past few weeks there has been something new in the air over the hyper-fortified border between the two Koreas. Silence.

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 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.