South Korean President Yun Seok-yeo called North Korea's balloon activities a despicable and irrational provocation.
 "North Korea launches more trash balloons, South Korea calls it 'irrational'")
Photo: BloombergAP Seoul
South Korea warned on Tuesday it would resume anti-Pyongyang frontline propaganda broadcasts after North Korea resumed launching garbage-carrying balloons, in the latest campaign reminiscent of Cold War-era inter-Korean conflict.
North Korea launched giant balloons loaded with plastic bags full of trash across the border on Monday night, its fifth campaign since late May and an apparent response to South Korean activists using balloons to drop political leaflets.
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South Korean President Yun Seok-yeo called North Korea's balloon activities a despicable and unreasonable act of provocation.
In a speech marking the 74th anniversary of the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War on Tuesday, Yoon said South Korea would maintain a robust military to respond with overwhelming force to any provocations by North Korea.
According to South Korea's military, North Korea launched about 350 balloons in recent operations, about 100 of which ended up falling on South Korean territory, mainly in and around Seoul, about 40 to 50 kilometers (25 to 30 miles) from the border. The military said the trash carried by the North Korean balloons was mostly paper, and no dangerous materials were found.
North Korea has previously released balloons into various parts of South Korea, dropping feces, cigarette butts, discarded batteries, pieces of cloth, waste paper, etc. No major damage has been reported. In response, South Korea relocated giant loudspeakers along the border for the first time in six years on June 9 and temporarily resumed anti-North Korea propaganda broadcasts.
Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesman Lee Seong-jun told reporters on Tuesday that South Korean forces were ready to activate loudspeakers on the border again. A written statement from the Joint Chiefs of Staff said officials would look into unspecified strategic and operational situations and that the resumption of broadcasts would depend on North Korean actions.
Balloon launches and loudspeaker broadcasts were a favorite form of psychological tactic between the two Koreas during the Cold War, and though the two sides agreed to end such activities in recent years, they would occasionally resume during renewed hostilities.
North Korea, which officially bans most of its 26 million people from accessing foreign news, is highly sensitive to South Korean border broadcasts and civilian leafleting campaigns.
Leafleting campaigns in South Korea by civilian activists, most of whom are defectors, have included leaflets criticizing North Korea's human rights abuses and USB sticks with South Korean TV dramas, while past border broadcasts have included K-pop songs, weather forecasts and outside news. In a statement on Friday, Kim Yo Jong, a strongman under Kim Jong Un, called them human scum and repulsive defectors.
South Korean authorities maintain that they are not restricting activists from dropping leaflets into North Korea, in accordance with a 2023 Constitutional Court ruling that invalidated laws criminalizing such leafleting, saying it was a violation of freedom of speech.
Many experts say North Korea's balloon campaign is also likely aimed at deepening debate in South Korea over the distribution of civilian leaflets and sparking broader internal divisions.
Concerns over North Korea intensified in mid-June when North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an agreement that obligated the two countries to provide assistance in case of attack and vowed to strengthen other cooperation, a pact that observers said represented the strongest ties between the two countries since the end of the Cold War.
The United States and its allies believe North Korea is providing Russia with conventional weapons needed for the war in Ukraine in return for military and economic aid.
In his Korean War speech, Yoon said the agreement between Kim Jong Un and Putin was an anachronism. South Korea, the United States and Japan issued a joint statement on Monday strongly condemning growing military cooperation between Russia and North Korea.
