Dr. Norbert Vollertsen of Germany was physically attacked twice in South Korea this weekend — once by South Korean officials on Friday when he was trying to launch toward North Korea balloons with radios on them and a second time by North and South Korean authorities yesterday when he was peacefully protesting the tyranny of the North Korean tyrant, Kim Jong Il. At last word, Dr. Vollertsen was so badly injured he couldn’t walk or talk.

The effort to get the radios sent to the information-starved North was, as these columns reported on June 24, the brainchild of Rev. Douglas Shin of California, who raised the money for the radios himself and who accompanied Dr. Vollertsen in South Korea.

Increasing the free flow of information to North Korea is crucial. The radios issued there are permanently tuned to government-run stations. Giving people living under totalitarian rule access to the rest of the world is a proven way to undermine a communist dictator; one only has to regard the success of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in helping to bring down the Iron Curtain.

That the launch of the balloons was thwarted by South Korea Friday is a tragedy. It was the South Koreans who stopped Dr. Vollertsen and company from sending the balloons off. It was the South Korean riot police who — intentionally or not — trampled on Dr. Vollertsen at yesterday’s protest, according to Rev. Shin, who told us that Seoul is just “a branch government of Pyongyang.” That’s an overstatement, but, given the events of this weekend, it’s easy to understand why Rev. Shin would think so.

Foreign policy expert Frank Gaffney says the “South Korean government is complicit in much of what the North is up to.” This is due in large part to the disastrous “sunshine policy” of engagement with the communist regime to the north. It’s not that there aren’t reasons for South Korean caution — no one wants an amateur balloon launch accidentally to trigger a North Korean offensive in which 8 million South Koreans die. The South Koreans are also concerned about the costs of absorbing an influx of North Korean refugees.

There will no doubt be those who argue that because Dr. Vollertsen is a German, this is not an American issue. There will be those who argue that the question of human rights and freedom in North Korea is a sideshow and that America should keep its eye on the question of North Korean nuclear proliferation, which is, the argument goes, the real security threat. There will be those who argue that the stance toward North Korea is a matter for the elected governments at Seoul, Washington, and Tokyo, not for individual activists.

Our own view is that it’s not the nuclear weapons themselves that are the threat but the regimes that wield them. We don’t spend a lot of time worrying, for example, about the fact that Great Britain and Israel are nuclear powers. By focusing on the nature of the regime in North Korea, Dr. Vollertsen, who witnessed the depredations of the communists there first hand for 18 months in 1999 and 2000, illuminates the nature of the threat that to this day requires the presence of 37,000 American troops in South Korea. The sooner the North Korean regime is gone, the sooner the threat will be gone. The right move for free countries is to be encouraging Dr. Vollertsen and his ilk, not trampling them.