South Korea yesterday urged North Korea to scrap a plan to launch propaganda leaflets across the border, after Pyongyang said it was ready to float 12 million leaflets in what would be the largest such psychological campaign against its southern rival.
Pyongyang has in the past few weeks issued a series of vitriolic condemnations of Seoul over anti-North Korea leaflets, which defectors based in South Korea send across the border — usually attached to balloons or floated in bottles.
Pyongyang said it would have nothing more to do with Seoul and last week blew up a liaison office on its side of the border that symbolized inter-Korean rapprochement, while threatening to bolster its military presence in and near the demilitarized zone.
Photo: EPA-EFE
South Korean Ministry of Unification spokesman Yoh Sangkey said that North Korea must suspend its plan to send anti-Seoul leaflets that “are not helpful to South-North relations at all.”
Earlier yesterday, North Korea said it had manufactured 12 million propaganda leaflets to be floated toward South Korea aboard 3,000 balloons and other unspecified delivery equipment.
“Our plan of distributing the leaflets against the enemy is an eruption of the unquenchable anger of all the people and the whole society,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said. “The time for retaliatory punishment is drawing near.”
One of the leaflets shown in the official Rodong Sinmun carried an image of South Korean President Moon Jae-in drinking from a cup and accused him of having “eaten it all, including the north-south Korea agreement.”
South Korean Minister of Defense Jeong Kyeong-doo yesterday told lawmakers that how his military responds to potential North Korean leafleting depends on what delivery equipment the North would use.
A South Korean activist has said that he would also drop about 1 million leaflets over the border around Thursday, the 70th anniversary of the start of the 1950-1953 Korean War.
South Korean officials have said they would ban civilian activists from launching balloons toward North Korea.
Both Koreas used to regularly send leaflets and loudspeaker broadcasts to the other side, but agreed to stop such activities in the Panmunjom Declaration that Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signed at their first summit in 2018.
North Korea has begun setting up loudspeakers at multiple locations along the border to broadcast propaganda, the South’s Yonhap news agency reported yesterday, citing an official of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Inter-Korean relations have been in a deep freeze following the collapse of a summit in Hanoi between Kim and US President Donald Trump early last year over what the nuclear-armed North would be willing to give up in exchange for a loosening of sanctions.
CHANGE OF MIND: The Chinese crew at first showed a willingness to cooperate, but later regretted that when the ship arrived at the port and refused to enter Togolese Republic-registered Chinese freighter Hong Tai (宏泰號) and its crew have been detained on suspicion of deliberately damaging a submarine cable connecting Taiwan proper and Penghu County, the Coast Guard Administration said in a statement yesterday. The case would be subject to a “national security-level investigation” by the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office, it added. The administration said that it had been monitoring the ship since 7:10pm on Saturday when it appeared to be loitering in waters about 6 nautical miles (11km) northwest of Tainan’s Chiang Chun Fishing Port, adding that the ship’s location was about 0.5 nautical miles north of the No.
A Chinese freighter that allegedly snapped an undersea cable linking Taiwan proper to Penghu County is suspected of being owned by a Chinese state-run company and had docked at the ports of Kaohsiung and Keelung for three months using different names. On Tuesday last week, the Togo-flagged freighter Hong Tai 58 (宏泰58號) and its Chinese crew were detained after the Taipei-Penghu No. 3 submarine cable was severed. When the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) first attempted to detain the ship on grounds of possible sabotage, its crew said the ship’s name was Hong Tai 168, although the Automatic Identification System (AIS)
COORDINATION, ASSURANCE: Separately, representatives reintroduced a bill that asks the state department to review guidelines on how the US engages with Taiwan US senators on Tuesday introduced the Taiwan travel and tourism coordination act, which they said would bolster bilateral travel and cooperation. The bill, proposed by US senators Marsha Blackburn and Brian Schatz, seeks to establish “robust security screenings for those traveling to the US from Asia, open new markets for American industry, and strengthen the economic partnership between the US and Taiwan,” they said in a statement. “Travel and tourism play a crucial role in a nation’s economic security,” but Taiwan faces “pressure and coercion from the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]” in this sector, the statement said. As Taiwan is a “vital trading
‘STRONG GENERATION’: The DPP has alleged that the TPP legislator-at-large used his position to help businesses affiliated with his wife, siblings, children and in-laws Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Legislator-at-large Wu Chun-cheng (吳春城), who has been accused of conflicts of interest related to his support for a “strong generation,” yesterday said he would resign from his post. The Act Promoting Development for Strong Generation Policies and Industries (壯世代政策與產業發展促進法) was passed on Jan. 7 to address aging through industrial development. It defines the “strong generation” as those aged 55 or older with the ability and willingness to work, and stipulates that the government is responsible for putting in place policies that help those in the aging population lead a better life. Wu, known for initiating the act, at
RSS