South Korean activists sent ten balloons filled with anti-Kim Jong-un leaflets to North Korea, the Yonhap agency announced, in response to the sending of balloons filled with garbage by Pyongyang last week.
“The Free North Korea defector movement announced that it had launched 200,000 leaflets to North Korea early this morning,” the South Korean news agency reported.
“We used ten balloons to send 200,000 brochures from Pocheon,” northeast of Seoul, said movement leader Park Sang-hak, quoted by Yonhap. He added that the balloons also carried USB drives with South Korean music.
An image relayed by the movement shows one of the activists with a large sign showing leader Kim Jong-un as well as his sister and regime spokesperson Kim Yo Jong.
The movement announced earlier in the week that it had sent balloons on May 10 carrying USB sticks with K-pop and Korean dramas (TV series) to North Korea, where this type of material is strictly prohibited.
“The enemy of the people Kim Jong-un sent filth and waste to the South Koreans but we, the defectors, send truth and love to our fellow North Koreans,” it reads.
Riposte after riposte
Pyongyang’s sending of these balloons of garbage amounts to “despicable provocations that any normal country would inevitably be ashamed of”, declared South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol during a speech on Thursday on the occasion of a tribute to the soldiers who died during the Korean War.
“The government will not remain inactive in the face of such provocations,” he added.
Yoon Suk Yeol suspended the entirety of a military detente agreement concluded in 2018 with North Korea on Tuesday, a few days after Pyongyang sent nearly a thousand balloons filled with garbage and excrement. animals across the border with its neighbor.
According to Pyongyang, these “sincere gifts” were aimed at responding to the sending of balloons loaded with propaganda into its territory by activists from the South.
“As Kim Yo Jong indicated that they would respond proportionately to the leaflets sent by the South, Pyongyang should send more balloons,” Hong Min, a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, told AFP .
“Then Seoul is expected to resume loudspeaker broadcasts along the border next week, to which the North could respond militarily,” he warned.
The military agreement largely lapsed last year when South Korea decided to partially suspend it following North Korea’s placing of a spy satellite into orbit. North Korea, for its part, has already assured that it will no longer honor it at all.
Its total suspension allows Seoul to resume live-fire exercises and relaunch propaganda campaigns against the North’s regime via loudspeakers along the border, which have always exasperated Pyongyang.