(Seoul) – North Korea once again sent balloons filled with garbage to South Korea on Saturday after activists from the south of the peninsula sent propaganda against the government in Pyongyang with the same operation.
“North Korea is firing again [présumés] South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement: “Balloons carrying waste are headed to the South,” and advised the public not to touch them and to report the balloons to the authorities.
The South Korean army announced a few hours ago that it was on alert for the possible arrival of such balloons, scheduled for Sunday.
In two waves last week, North Korea sent hundreds of balloons to its southern neighbor loaded with bags filled with various garbage, ranging from cigarette butts to animal waste.
According to Pyongyang, these “sincere gifts” were intended to respond to the sending of propaganda-laden balloons to its territory by South Korean activists.
Pyongyang announced on Sunday, June 2, that it would stop these measures.
But a few days later, an organization of South Korean activists, Fighters for a Free North Korea, said it had sent ten balloons to the north of the peninsula carrying 200,000 leaflets against North Korea's first man Kim Jong-un and USB sticks containing K-pop music. South Korean.
Justice decision
Another group, made up of North Korean defectors, said it also sent ten balloons containing 200,000 anti-Pyongyang leaflets on Friday, as well as 100 radios and USB sticks containing a speech by South Korean President Yeon Suk-yul.
Jang Se-yeol, the leader of these defectors, confirmed on Saturday that his organization would not stop its campaign “whether Kim Jong-un sends balloons carrying waste again or not.”
However, North Korea warned that it would respond with “waste paper and garbage” in quantities 100 times larger if South Korea sent leaflets.
Last year, South Korea's Constitutional Court overturned a 2020 law criminalizing sending propaganda against Pyongyang, saying it limited freedom of expression. Experts say there is now no legal basis for the government to prevent activists from launching balloons into North Korea.
For his part, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yul on Tuesday completely suspended the 2018 military détente agreement with North Korea, after he described sending balloons filled with garbage as “despicable provocations by Pyongyang.”
“Helping the North Koreans”
The move allows South Korea to resume live-fire exercises and resume loudspeaker propaganda campaigns along the border against the North Korean regime, which have always angered Pyongyang.
South Korean activists have long sent balloons into North Korea to deliver propaganda against Pyongyang, as well as cash, rice, South Korean TV series and USB devices.
Coensime, another South Korean activist group, said it threw 500 plastic bottles into the sea on Friday near the border with North Korea.
The bottles were filled with rice, money and a USB drive containing a South Korean TV series featuring a love story between a wealthy South Korean heiress and a North Korean army officer.
These activists have been sending this type of material to the North twice a month since 2015.
“We were doing what we have been doing for a long time to help starving North Koreans,” Park Jung-oh, the group’s leader, said on Saturday.
Inter-Korean relations are at their lowest levels in years, with diplomacy at a prolonged standstill, Kim Jong Un stepping up testing and continuing weapons development, and the South moving closer to its main security ally, Washington.
