South Korea’s military warned that more trash-carrying balloons could arrive from North Korea on Sunday.
Last week, North Korea released hundreds of balloons with bags of rubbish into the South, claiming they were in retaliation to anti-Pyongyang propaganda balloons flown in the opposite direction by South Korean activists.
Pyongyang halted the balloons on Sunday, but days later, a South Korean group named “Fighters for Free North Korea” claimed to have sent 10 balloons with K-pop music and 200,000 pamphlets opposing leader Kim Jong-un.
North Korea had said it would respond with “wastepaper and rubbish” a hundred times the amount if more South Korean leaflets were sent.
The North Korean balloons last week landed in a number of locations in the South and were found to be carrying garbage such as cigarette butts, cardboard scrap and waste batteries.
In response to the balloons, South Korea completely suspended a 2018 military deal with the North, which was meant to reduce tensions between the neighbours.
Authorities in Seoul have condemned the North Korean balloons as a “low-class” act and threatened countermeasures that it said Pyongyang would find “unendurable”.
Activists in South Korea have long sent balloons northwards, filled with anti-Pyongyang propaganda, cash, rice, and Korean TV series on USB thumb drives.
These have always infuriated North Korea, whose government is extremely sensitive about its people gaining access to South Korean pop culture.
Tensions over the dueling propaganda have boiled over in dramatic fashion in the past.
Pyongyang unilaterally severed off all formal military and political communication lines with Seoul in 2020, alleging anti-North leaflets and blowing up a defunct inter-Korean liaison office on its side of the border.
Last year, South Korea’s Constitutional Court overturned a 2020 law that criminalized the distribution of anti-Pyongyang propaganda, citing an unreasonable restriction on free speech.
Kim Jong-un’s influential sister, Kim Yo-jong, criticized South Korea for protesting over the balloons last week, claiming that the North Koreans were only expressing their freedom of expression.
