North Korea has resumed an unusual activity to show its anger at South Korea: dumping trash from the sky on the world’s most heavily armed border.
From Tuesday evening to Wednesday, South Korea’s military said it found 260 balloons floating over the Demilitarized Zone, the buffer zone between the two Koreas. Soon after, people across Korea, including some in the capital Seoul, reported seeing plastic bags falling from the sky.
Authorities sent chemical and biological terrorism response teams as well as bomb disposal teams to inspect the payload. But they only found trash, like cigarette butts, plastic water bottles, used paper and shoes, and what looked like compost. The South Korean military said trash is released hourly when the balloon flies into the country’s airspace.
North Korea in recent years has made greater and greater progress aggressive military stance. Its unusual attack this week prompted South Korea to send cellphone warnings to people living near the inter-Korean border to limit outdoor activities and be on the lookout for unidentified objects from above. the sky falls. Some confusion arose when the warning message included the automatically generated English phrase “Preliminary warning of air strike.” The government said it will fix this problem.
“Such actions by North Korea are a clear violation of international law and are a serious threat to the safety of our people,” South Korea’s military said in a statement on Thursday. Private. “We issue a stern warning to North Korea to stop this dirty and inhumane practice.”
The North Korean balloons arrived in South Korea days after Pyongyang accused North Korean defectors living in South Korea of ”spreading leaflets and many dirty things” through the country’s border districts and vowed to handle “tit-for-tat action.”
“Piles of waste paper and trash will soon be scattered across the border and inland areas” of South Korea, Kim Kang Il, North Korea’s vice minister of defense, said in a statement Saturday. “It will experience first-hand how much effort it takes to get rid of them.”
During the Cold War decades following the 1950-53 Korean War, the two countries waged war Fierce psychological warfareattack each other with propaganda broadcasts and send millions propaganda leaflets go over the border to.
Such activities ebb and flow depending on the political situation on the Korean Peninsula. The two Koreas agreed to de-escalate their propaganda war after a landmark summit in 2000, at which they agreed to promote reconciliation. The countries again reaffirmed that agreement when North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in met in 2018.
But North Korean defector and conservative activists in the South continued to release balloons into the North. Their balloons carried small Bibles, dollar bills, computer drives containing South Korean soap operas and leaflets calling out Mr. Kim and his father and grandfather, the previous rulers of the North. he, were “pigs,” “vampires,” and “womanizers.” ”
Their supporters say the balloons have helped eliminate the lack of information and cult of personality that North Korea imposes on its people.
North Korea has insulted their military to the point Fired Anti-aircraft guns to shoot down plastic balloons heading north. In 2016, it revenge by sending balloons filled with cigarette butts and other trash, as well as leaflets calling then-South Korean leader Park Geun-hye an “evil witch.” A few years later, it declared that balloons from the South carried the Covid-19 virus.
In 2021, South Korea issued a law prohibiting the distribution of leaflets into North Korea. Government at that time speak that the balloons did little more than provoke the North and also created trash in the South because some balloons never made it across the border.
But last year, the Southern Constitutional Court rejected this law, calling it unconstitutional and a violation of freedom of speech.
