North Korea despatched lots of extra trash-carrying balloons over the border, Seoul’s army stated Monday, after Kim Jong Un’s highly effective sister warned of additional responses if the South retains up its “psychological warfare”.
In latest weeks, North Korea has despatched lots of of balloons into the South, carrying trash like cigarette butts and bathroom paper, in what it calls retaliation for balloons laden with anti-Pyongyang propaganda floated northwards by activists within the South, which Seoul legally can not cease.
The South Korean authorities this month totally suspended a 2018 tension-reducing army deal and restarted loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts alongside the border in response to Pyongyang’s balloons, infuriating the North which warned Seoul was creating “a new crisis”.
Kim’s sister and key authorities spokeswoman Kim Yo Jong stated in an announcement launched early Monday that South Korea would “suffer a bitter embarrassment of picking up waste paper without rest and it will be its daily work”.
In the assertion carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, she slammed the activists’ leaflets as “psychological warfare” and warned that except Seoul stopped them and known as off the loudspeaker broadcasts, the North would hit again.
“If the ROK simultaneously carries out the leaflet scattering and loudspeaker broadcasting provocation over the border, it will undoubtedly witness the new counteraction of the DPRK,” she stated, referring to each international locations by their official names.
Seoul’s army stated the North had despatched round 310 trash-carrying balloons in a single day, with no extra detected within the air by early Monday, the Yonhap news company reported.
“The latest batch of waste-loaded balloons sent late Sunday contained scrap paper and plastic, with no toxic material detected so far,” Yonhap stated, citing the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The assertion from Kim’s sister exhibits that “North Korea is raising its voice in order to shift the blame for the current situation to South Korea and also to justify their provocation,” Kim Dong-yub, professor on the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, advised AFP.
It is probably going that the cycle of escalation will proceed and “North Korea will do something beyond our imagination,” Kim stated.
Pyongyang may do “something creative like throwing flour (which) will cause absolute panic in the South which they will be happy about,” Kim added, referring to the opportunity of the North faking a organic assault on the South.
The tit-for-tat balloon blitz began in mid-May when activists within the South — together with North Korean defectors — despatched dozens of missives carrying anti-Kim propaganda and flash drives of Okay-pop music northwards.
In response, Pyongyang has despatched greater than a thousand balloons carrying luggage of rubbish into the South, which Seoul has branded “low class”, whereas additionally claiming it violates the armistice settlement that ended hostilities within the 1950 to 1953 Korean War.
In response to the balloons, Seoul tore up the 2018 army deal and resumed loudspeakers broadcasts alongside the border — which haven’t been used since 2016, once they have been turned on in retaliation for North Korea’s fourth nuclear take a look at, Yonhap stated.
In 2018, throughout a interval of improved inter-Korean relations, the leaders of the 2 Koreas agreed to “completely cease all hostile acts”, together with stopping the leaflets and broadcasts.
The South Korean parliament handed a regulation in 2020 criminalising sending leaflets to the North, however activists didn’t cease and the regulation was struck down by the Constitutional Court final 12 months as an undue limitation on free speech.
The broadcasts, a tactic which dates again to the Korean War, infuriate Pyongyang, which beforehand threatened artillery strikes towards the loudspeaker models except they have been switched off.
Source: www.anews.com.tr