(Seoul) North Korea again sent balloons filled with rubbish to South Korea on Saturday, the South Korean army said, the day after a warning from Seoul on retaliatory measures if Pyongyang continued this operation.
Earlier this week, North Korea sent some 260 balloons filled with trash, including used batteries, cigarette butts and animal feces, to the South, according to the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Seoul condemned this action, calling it “low standard”, and the South Korean Ministry of Unification warned on Friday of countermeasures if Pyongyang did not stop these “irrational” provocations.
North Korea is “again flying balloons carrying waste towards the South,” the South Korean General Staff said in a message to journalists.
He advised the public not to touch them if they located them, and to report them to authorities.
The Seoul municipality also sent an alert message to residents on Saturday about the presence of “an unidentified object believed to be North Korean propaganda leaflets”.
The object was “detected in the airspace near Seoul and is currently being processed by the military,” according to the municipality, which advised residents against “outdoor activities.”
Pyongyang said at the start of the week that its balloons, “sincere gifts”, were intended to respond to the sending into its territory of balloons loaded with propaganda leaflets against leader Kim Jong-un.
North Korea has long been exasperated by these actions carried out by South Korean activists, who sometimes also send money, rice or USB sticks of South Korean television dramas.
Judging on Saturday that the North Korean operation was “of unimaginable pettiness and baseness”, the South Korean Minister of Defense, Shin Won-sik, affirmed that those sent from the South were on the other hand “aid balloons humanitarian”.
In 2018, during an improvement in their relations, the two neighbors agreed to “completely cease all hostile acts towards each other”, including the distribution of leaflets.
South Korean parliamentarians passed a law in 2020 criminalizing the sending of leaflets to the North, but activists did not stop it.
The same year, Pyongyang, citing the continuation of these activities, unilaterally cut military and political relations with the South and destroyed an inter-Korean liaison office on its side of the border.
South Korea’s Constitutional Court has since overturned the law in 2023 in the name of freedom of expression.
By releasing their balloons, North Koreans are simply exercising their freedom of expression, quipped Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, one of the main spokespersons for his regime.