South Korea‘s navy stated it was on alert for probably extra trash-carrying balloons arriving from North Korea on Sunday, a possible response to the propaganda balloons despatched this week by South Korean activists.
North Korea despatched a whole bunch of balloons in two waves final week with baggage of trash into the South, describing them as a response to anti-Pyongyang propaganda balloons despatched the opposite means by South Korean activists.
Pyongyang introduced a halt to the balloons on Sunday however days later, a South Korean group known as “Fighters for Free North Korea” stated it had despatched 10 balloons with USB thumb drives containing Okay-pop music and 200,000 leaflets in opposition to chief Kim Jong Un.
The South Korean navy is “closely monitoring with vigilance” due to “the possibility of more trash balloons descending around tomorrow”, its spokesperson advised AFP on Saturday.
North Korea had stated it could reply with “wastepaper and rubbish” 100 instances the quantity if extra South Korean leaflets had been despatched.
Another group, comprising North Korean defectors, stated it had despatched 10 balloons on Friday with 200,000 anti-Pyongyang leaflets, 100 radios, and USB thumb drives containing a speech by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
Jang Se-yul, the chief of the group, advised AFP on Saturday his organisation won’t cease its marketing campaign, “whether Kim Jong Un sends trash-carrying balloons again or not”.
The North Korean balloons final week landed in a variety of areas within the South, and had been discovered to be carrying rubbish equivalent to cigarette butts, cardboard scrap and waste batteries.
In response to the balloons, South Korea on Tuesday fully suspended a 2018 navy take care of the North, which was meant to scale back tensions between the neighbours.
Authorities in Seoul have condemned the North Korean balloons as a “low-class” act and threatened countermeasures that it stated Pyongyang would discover “unendurable”.
Activists in South Korea have lengthy despatched balloons northwards, crammed with anti-Pyongyang propaganda, money, rice, and Korean TV sequence on USB thumb drives.
These have at all times infuriated North Korea, whose authorities is extraordinarily delicate about its folks having access to South Korean popular culture.
Kuensaem, one other South Korean activist group, advised AFP that it threw 500 plastic bottles into the ocean on Friday close to the border with North Korea.
The bottles had been crammed with rice, money and a USB drive with a South Korean TV sequence “Crash Landing on You” — which encompasses a romance between a rich South Korean heiress and a North Korean military officer.
“We were just doing what we’ve been doing for a long time to help North Koreans who are starving,” the group’s chief Park Jung-oh advised AFP Saturday.
Tensions over the duelling propaganda have boiled over in dramatic style prior to now.
In 2020, blaming the anti-North leaflets, Pyongyang unilaterally reduce off all official navy and political communication hyperlinks with Seoul and blew up a disused inter-Korean liaison workplace on its aspect of the border.
Last yr, South Korea’s Constitutional Court struck down a 2020 legislation that criminalised the sending of anti-Pyongyang propaganda, calling it an undue limitation on free speech.
Experts say there are actually no authorized grounds for the federal government to cease activists from sending balloons into North Korea.
South Korea’s unification ministry stated on Saturday that the difficulty is “being approached in consideration” of the 2023 court docket choice.
Kim Jong Un’s highly effective sister Kim Yo Jong mocked South Korea for complaining concerning the balloons final week, saying North Koreans had been merely exercising their freedom of expression.
Source: www.anews.com.tr