SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea resumed flying balloons likely loaded with trash toward South Korea on Thursday, South Korea’s military said, days after vowing to respond to a new leafleting campaign by South Korean civilians across the border.
The balloons were flying north of Seoul, about an hour’s drive from the border, on Thursday afternoon, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.
The ministry warned South Koreans to be on the lookout for falling objects and to report any balloons they spot on the ground to authorities.
Since late May, North Korea has sent more than 2,000 balloons loaded with waste paper, rags, cigarette butts and even fertilizer toward South Korea in retaliation for South Korean activists using North Korean balloons to send political leaflets into the North. No dangerous materials were found.
In response, South Korea suspended a 2018 de-escalation agreement with North Korea, temporarily resumed propaganda broadcasts and resumed frontline live-fire military drills in the border area.
Cold War-style military activity between the two Koreas has been on hold since North Korea sent balloons loaded with garbage toward South Korea in late June.
Earlier this week, Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said South Korean balloons had been spotted again on the border and elsewhere in North Korea. In a statement on Tuesday, she threatened new retaliatory measures, saying South Korean “scum” must be prepared to pay a “terribly high price,” raising concerns that North Korea may launch a physical provocation rather than a balloon launch.
South Korea’s military said on Wednesday it had stepped up preparations for any provocations from North Korea, which it said could open fire on South Korean balloons flying across the border.
It was not immediately clear whether South Korean groups had dropped leaflets in North Korea recently, but for years, activist groups led by defectors have used helium-filled balloons to drop anti-North Korea leaflets, USB sticks containing K-pop and Korean dramas, and U.S. dollar bills into the country.
North Korea sees such actions as a serious security threat and a challenge to its ban on foreign news for most of its 26 million people.
In 2020, North Korea was so enraged by a leafleting campaign by South Korean civilians that it destroyed an unmanned liaison office built by South Korea on its territory. In 2014, North Korea opened fire on balloons flying toward its territory, and South Korea fired back, but without any casualties.
Tensions between the two Koreas have risen in recent years due to North Korean missile tests and expanded U.S.-South Korean military drills that Pyongyang has described as an invasion rehearsal.
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