North Korean dirt balloons blow up peace agreement with the South

South Korea announced on Monday that it would suspend a military agreement signed with North Korea to punish Kim Jong Un’s regime for sending waves of balloons carrying garbage and excrement across the border.

According to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, nearly 1,000 balloons have flown south over the fortified border separating the Korean peninsula since Thursday, sparking a furious response from Seoul, which on Sunday vowed “unbearable” retaliation. North Korea announced it would stop sending balloons an hour after the weekend threat, but the South is now prepared to take punitive action anyway.

South Korea’s National Security Council has announced it will suspend a 2018 inter-Korean agreement aimed at easing tensions along the border. The Presidential Council said it would seek Cabinet approval to suspend the agreement on Tuesday, noting that the suspension would allow the South Korean military to conduct exercises near the border.

Man who started balloon fight in North Korea plans revenge for feces attack

The agreement will remain on hold “until mutual trust between the two Koreas is restored,” the presidential office said.

The pact emerged after months of summit talks between the two countries in 2018, but has been on the verge of collapse since North Korea launched a spy satellite in November. South Korea partially suspended the agreement by resuming surveillance flights along the border, and Pyongyang further accelerated the deal’s collapse in January by conducting artillery firing drills near its western maritime border with the South.

While the agreement required both sides to cease hostilities against the other, it did not explicitly ban the distribution of leaflets to civilians, according to the Associated Press. This meant that South Korean activists could continue to send balloons containing anti-regime leaflets and USB sticks containing world news across the border into the North, sparking outrage in Pyongyang.

North Korea is accused of carrying out an attack using floating excrement balloons

The balloons from the North arrived in the South last week after North Korea’s Deputy Defense Minister Kim Kang Il accused Seoul of “scattering leaflets and other dirty things near the border area” and threatened “equal consequences” in return.

On Sunday, he said North Korea had scattered “15 tons of waste paper, the favorite toy of human scum, over the border areas” of South Korea. Kim Kang Il said Pyongyang would now “stop” the campaign because the South now had “enough experience” of how “uncomfortable” the balloons were and “how much effort” it required to clean them.

If the South continues with its own balloons, he added, “we will respond by distributing waste paper and garbage in a hundredfold quantity, as many leaflets and cases as we have already warned about.”

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