Ball attacks | Why did North Korea dump its waste on the South?

(Seoul) North Korea released 720 balloons over the world’s most heavily armed border overnight from Saturday to Sunday, hitting South Korea with its payload: plastic bags filled with cigarette butts and other waste.

Between last Tuesday and Sunday, North Korea sent about 1,000 of these garbage balloons across the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas. When the balloons reach South Korean airspace, their timer releases plastic bags containing various trash, including old scraps of paper and fabric.

According to initial reports, the balloons were carrying human excrement. The South Korean military denied the report, but said it had found what appeared to be compost.

Nothing dangerous was found by South Korean authorities. On Sunday, President Yoon Suk-yeol’s office accused North Korea of ​​”dirty provocations that no normal country would dream of.” He said South Korea would take “steps that North Korea would find intolerable.”

In the South, there is talk of using loudspeakers along the inter-Korean border to broadcast K-pop, a musical genre that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un considers threatening and which he has already described as ” vicious cancer.”

The North called the balloon offensive a “retaliation.” He accuses North Korean defectors living in the South of having “dropped leaflets and various filth” in his border areas in recent days.

Disturbing, but without real consequences

When North Korea carries out launches, it is with rockets carrying satellites or with ballistic missiles supposed to be capable of carrying nuclear warheads. But last week saw the return of an old Cold War tactic: propaganda balloons and psychological warfare.

The recent balloon release caused public confusion as authorities reported an “air raid” to populations near the border. There have been complaints.

Most South Koreans remained stoic, treating the matter as just another irritant from the North. People posted photos online of North Korean balloons full of trash, in trees, on farmland or on city streets. One of the bags was heavy enough to smash the windshield of a parked car, according to photos released by newspapers.

But the atmosphere tensed when South Korean authorities urged the population not to touch the balloons and to report them immediately. North Korea has biological and chemical weapons, which its agents have already used to assassinate Kim’s half-brother, Kim Jong-nam.

In photos and videos released Sunday, soldiers inspecting trash wore biological protection and demining gear.

The return of an old tactic

During the Cold War, the two Koreas engaged in psychological warfare. Broadcasts broadcast on shortwave aimed to influence citizens on the other side. Along the demilitarized zone, loudspeakers spewed propaganda songs at rival soldiers day and night. Large signs encouraged soldiers to defect to the “people’s paradise” in the North or to the “free and democratic” South.

And balloons loaded with leaflets were released in both directions. Millions of leaflets vilifying the other side’s government were scattered across the Korean Peninsula; both Koreas prohibited their populations from reading or keeping them. In the South, police rewarded children with pencils and other school supplies when they found the leaflets in the hills and reported them.

But until recently, North Korea kept its trash to itself.

Court rules in favor of balloons

With South Korea’s economic development starting in the 1990s, the North’s propaganda lost credibility. The South had by then become a vibrant democracy and a global exporting power, while the North suffered from chronic food shortages and relied on the cult of personality and absolute control of information to control its people.

Then, in 2000, their leaders held an inter-Korean summit and both Koreas agreed to end government efforts to influence each other’s citizens. But North Korean defectors and conservative and Christian activists from the South pressed on, sending balloons loaded with mini-Bibles, transistor radios, household medicines, USB sticks containing K-pop music and coins of theater and also launching leaflets which called Kim a “pig”.

For them, these balloons contain the “truth” and “freedom of expression” that can counter the brainwashing practiced on North Koreans by the dictatorship. For Pyongyang, these messages were political “dirt,” and North Korean leaders promised to retaliate.

The Seoul government then issued a law banning the sending of leaflets to the North, believing that they only provoked Pyongyang. But in 2023, a court ruled the law unconstitutional, and in May, activists began releasing balloons again.

“We tried something they’ve been doing forever; I don’t understand why they are making such a big deal out of it, as if they were being showered with bullets,” Kim Yo-jong, Kim Jong-un’s sister and spokesperson, said last week. “If they feel how unpleasant it is to clean up this mess, they will know that it is not easy to dare to talk about freedom of expression. »

This article was first published in the New York Times.

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