South Korea is on alert because of more garbage balloons from the North

The South Korean military said it was on alert for the possibility of more garbage-laden balloons arriving from North Korea on Sunday, possibly in response to propaganda balloons sent by South Korean activists this week.

North Korea sent hundreds of balloons filled with garbage bags into the South in two waves last week, describing them as a response to anti-Pyongyang propaganda balloons sent in the other direction by South Korean activists.

Pyongyang announced a halt to the balloons on Sunday, but a few days later a South Korean group called Fighters for a Free North Korea said it had sent out ten balloons with USB sticks containing K-pop music and 200,000 leaflets against ruler Kim Jong Un.

The South Korean military is “monitoring the situation closely and with great vigilance” as “there is a possibility that more garbage balloons will descend tomorrow,” its spokesman told AFP on Saturday.

North Korea had declared that it would respond with a hundred times as much “garbage and rubbish” if more South Korean leaflets were sent.

Another group, made up of North Korean defectors, said it sent 10 balloons containing 200,000 anti-Pyongyang leaflets, 100 radios and USB sticks with a speech by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Friday.

Jang Se-yul, the group’s leader, told AFP on Saturday that his organization would not stop its campaign “whether Kim Jong Un launches garbage balloons again or not.”

The North Korean balloons landed in several locations in the South last week and found garbage such as cigarette butts, cardboard scraps and old batteries.

In response to the balloons, South Korea on Tuesday completely suspended a 2018 military agreement with the North that was intended to reduce tensions between the neighbors.

Authorities in Seoul condemned the North Korean balloons as a “low-class” action and threatened countermeasures that Pyongyang would find “unbearable.”

– Dueling Propaganda –

Activists in South Korea have long been sending balloons northward filled with anti-Pyongyang propaganda, cash, rice and Korean television series on USB sticks.

These incidents have always infuriated North Korea, as the government is extremely sensitive to its population having access to South Korean pop culture.

Kuensaem, another South Korean activist group, told AFP it had thrown 500 plastic bottles into the sea near the border with North Korea on Friday.

The bottles were filled with rice, cash and a USB stick with the South Korean television series “Crash Landing on You” – which is about the romance between a wealthy South Korean heiress and a North Korean army officer.

“We were just doing what we have been doing for a long time, which is helping starving North Koreans,” the group’s leader, Park Jung-oh, told AFP on Saturday.

Tensions related to competing propaganda have already escalated dramatically in the past.

In 2020, amid accusations from the North, Pyongyang unilaterally cut all official military and political communications with Seoul and blew up a defunct inter-Korean liaison office on its side of the border.

Last year, South Korea’s Constitutional Court overturned a 2020 law that criminalized the sending of anti-Pyongyang propaganda, calling it an unreasonable restriction on free expression.

According to experts, the government currently has no legal basis to prevent activists from sending balloons to North Korea.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry said on Saturday that the matter would be reviewed “taking into account” the 2023 court decision.

Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister Kim Yo Jong mocked South Korea for complaining about the balloons last week, saying North Koreans were simply exercising their freedom of expression.

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