If North Korea’s trash balloons are considered soft terrorism, than is the South Korean activists who send balloons into North Korea also soft terrorists?:
North Korea’s obnoxious sending of trash-filled balloons to South Korea is a “form of soft terrorism,” a U.S. think tank report said Tuesday, stressing it should not be taken lightly though it reflects the recalcitrant regime’s “weakness” and “insecurity.”
Victor Cha, senior vice president for Asia and Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Andy Lim, an associate fellow with the CSIS Korea Chair, released the report that analyzed Pyongyang’s campaign involving garbage-filled balloons in a question-and-answer format.
This should give everyone further indications on how healthy the people in North Korea are:
Parasites have been detected in some of the trash-filled balloons sent by North Korea to South Korea, but no harmful substances were found, Seoul’s unification ministry said Monday.
In recent weeks, North Korea has sent more than 1,000 trash-carrying balloons toward the South on multiple occasions in retaliation for South Korean activists’ leaflet campaigns condemning the North Korean regime.
“Numerous parasites, such as roundworms, whipworms and threadworms, were found in the soil contained in the trash,” the ministry said in a press release, adding that the parasites are believed to originate from human excrement.
The findings are based on an examination of 70 balloons.
The trash attacks into South Korea are continuing:
North Korea on Monday sent balloons presumed to be carrying trash toward South Korea again, Seoul’s military said.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff said the balloons appeared to be travelling in a southeastern direction from the northern part of Gyeonggi Province that surrounds Seoul.
It advised the public to not touch fallen balloons and report them to military or police authorities.
On Friday, Kim Yo-jong, the influential sister of the North’s leader, hinted about launching more balloons after North Korean defectors in the South sent balloons with anti-Pyongyang leaflets toward the North earlier in the week.
Fire from waste paper in balloon sent by N. Korea This photo, provided by the Incheon Fire Service on June 10, 2024, shows waste paper from a balloon sent by North Korea catching fire on a road in Ganghwa, Incheon, 27 kilometers west of Seoul, the previous day. The agency said the cause of the fire has yet to be known. ( (Yonhap)
Defector group sends leaflets to N. Korea This image, provided by Gyeoreul Unification Solidarity on June 8, 2024, shows its members preparing to send balloons carrying propaganda leaflets critical of the North Korean regime across the border. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap)
The balloon wars between North and South Korea continue:
A North Korean defectors’ group said Thursday it has sent about 10 large plastic balloons carrying propaganda leaflets against the North Korean regime across the border, raising concerns Pyongyang could resume sending trash-filled balloons.
Filled with 200,000 flyers criticizing the regime, dollar bills and USB sticks loaded with K-pop and trot music, the balloons were floated from Pocheon, north of Seoul, early Thursday, according to Park Sang-hak, head of the Fighters for a Free North Korea (FFNK).
A military source confirmed that some of these balloons have flown into the North but said no signs of retaliatory action were detected yet from the North Korean side, including any launch of ballistic missiles or release of balloons loaded with trash.
It is pretty amazing how far some of the trash filled balloons from North Korea were able to fly into South Korea, to include Osan Airbase:
The U.S. military confirmed Monday that debris found near an on-base school the previous day had been carried by balloon from North Korea. The inflatable came down Sunday on Osan Air Base, near Osan Elementary School, according to principal Allyse Struhs’ email to parents and guardians that evening.
U.S. Forces Korea spokesman David Kim said in a statement Monday that at least one North Korean balloon was found at Osan, home of 7th Air Force and the 51st Fighter Wing about 30 miles south of Seoul. “The debris primarily consisted of basketball-size black plastic bags filled with trash and cloth, which were deemed safe with no threat to the public after investigation,” he wrote.
It will be interesting to see if the Yoon administration stops Park Hang-sak and his group, Fighters for a Free North Korea, from sending propaganda balloons to North Korea in order to put and end to the North Korean trash attacks:
A cleaner takes away bags of trash carried airborne by North Korean balloons in a parking lot outside a shopping mall in Siheung, Gyeonggi Province, on June 2, 2024. (Yonhap)
North Korea said Sunday it will temporarily stop sending trash-filled balloons across the border to South Korea, though it also threatened to resume such operations if Seoul sends more anti-Pyongyang leaflets.
In a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korean Vice Defense Minister Kim Kang-il claimed Pyongyang had sent 3,500 balloons, carrying 15 tons worth of debris, toward South Korea between Tuesday night and Sunday morning.
Kim offered to temporarily halt that activity because it was solely in response to anti-communist leaflets flown up north by South Korean activists.
Kim added that should South Korea send such leaflets again, North Korea will retaliate with balloons carrying “garbage amounting to 100 times” the quantity of those propaganda pieces of paper.
This is a lesson from dictatorship 101, you have to control the flow of information to the people to maintain regime control; the balloon flights challenge this control:
Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector-turned-activist and founder of the advocacy group Fighters for a Free North Korea, holds up propaganda material condemning North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for developing nuclear weapons and missiles without feeding the country’s hungry residents in this April 2021 photo. Courtesy of Fighters for a Free North Korea
Pyongyang has belatedly reacted furiously to South Korean Constitutional Court’s decision in September to strike down the ban on sending propaganda leaflets over the border into North Korea.
In a statement released in November, North Korea’s Central News Agency (KCNA) said the court’s decision signals a de facto war against the North as information warfare is part of an operation preceding a ground war.
Calling North Korean defectors who flew the leaflets across the border “garbage,” the KCNA said that North Korea’s firing of anti-aircraft rounds across the border in 2014 and its destroying of the inter-Korean liason office used for talks between the two countries in 2020 are two chilling reminders of what South Korea could face.
In 2014, North Korea used anti-aircraft guns to shoot down balloons carrying anti-Pyongyang leaflets flown by South Korean activists near the border town of Yeoncheon.
North Korea’s furious reaction to the court’s lifting of the ban on sending propaganda leaflets into the North reflects the regime fears its people being exposed to outside information.
It looks like if a liberal administration takes over again they will have a harder time trying to shutdown Fighters for a Free North Korea with this court ruling:
A South Korean court on Tuesday found a law banning private entities from sending leaflets or other items by balloon into North Korea unconstitutional.
In a 7-2 decision, the Constitutional Court found the Development of Inter-Korean Relations Act, promulgated in 2020 during the liberal Moon Jae-in administration, unconstitutional. Scores of North Korean human rights groups filed the complaint with the Constitutional Court immediately after the law came into effect.
