The conflict over balloon-sent propaganda between North and South Korea has escalated as South Korean activists announced the deployment of balloons carrying anti-North Korean messages across the heavily fortified border.
On Thursday, the Free North Korea Movement, a group of defectors from the North, claimed responsibility for launching 10 large balloons filled with 200,000 leaflets critical of Kim Jong-un’s regime.
These balloons also contained US dollar bills and USB flash drives loaded with K-pop music, according to South Korean media reports.
Tensions between the two Koreas flared up last week when North Korea released nearly 1,000 balloons filled with trash, cigarette butts, and what seemed to be excrement.
This was in response to South Korean groups using balloons to disseminate information critical of the Kim regime and promoting the benefits of life in South Korea.
North Korea had agreed to temporarily stop its balloon flights after Seoul threatened “unendurable” countermeasures, including the resumption of loud propaganda broadcasts and pop music across the DMZ—a buffer zone that has separated the peninsula since the Korean War ended in 1953.
There are growing concerns that North Korea might restart its “dirty” balloon campaign in retaliation to the activists’ latest actions.
The North had previously warned it could send “one hundred times the quantity of toilet paper and filth” in response to the South’s provocations, as reported by Yonhap news agency.
A photograph from the defectors’ group showed an activist holding a large poster featuring images of Kim Jong-un and his influential sister, Kim Yo-jong.
The poster read, “Enemy of the people Kim Jong-un sent filth and trash to the South Korean people, but we the defectors send truth and love to our fellow North Koreans!”
Earlier this week, the group announced they had sent balloons carrying approximately 2,000 USB flash drives containing songs by South Korean singer Lim Young-woong, along with other K-pop music and K-dramas, into North Korea on May 10.
This act reportedly triggered the latest wave of trash-filled balloons sent back by the North.
The ongoing balloon campaign has strained relations between the two countries and led South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol to suspend a 2018 agreement aimed at easing cross-border tensions.
This suspension allows South Korea to resume live-fire drills and restart anti-Kim broadcasts near the border.
Reinstating the broadcasts would likely provoke North Korea, which has previously threatened to destroy the loudspeakers with artillery if they were turned back on.