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.
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