Tag: propaganda

This tit-for-tat is better than the two Koreas shooting at each other:

South Korea’s military blared K-pop songs and news through its loudspeakers across the border with North Korea on Sunday as it stepped up its psychological campaign in response to North Korea’s repeated launches of trash balloons.

The move came five days after Kim Yo-jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, warned of “gruesome and dear” consequences over continued leaflet campaigns seen by North Korea as psychological warfare.

North Korea has sent more than 2,000 trash-filled balloons into the South over nine occasions in a tit-for-tat retaliation for anti-Pyongyang leaflets that North Korean defectors in South Korea send to North Korea using balloons.

“As we have warned numerous times, we will conduct loudspeaker broadcasts in full-scale at all fronts starting from 1 p.m.,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said in a notice to reporters.

The propaganda broadcasts typically comprise news, a message urging North Korean soldiers near the border to escape to South Korea as well as K-pop songs, including global K-pop sensation BTS’ megahit singles “Dynamite” and “Butter.”

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

I just don’t see restarting propaganda broadcasts as something that will stop these trash attacks. These attack are low cost, effective, and have little risk of escalation for the North Korean regime:

The South Korean government decided, Sunday, to resume loudspeaker broadcasts along the inter-Korean border in response to North Korea’s recent launches of trash-carrying balloons.

Hours after the decision, the military announced that it had aired messages — presumably critical of the North Korean regime — across the border. However, it declined to provide details on the psychological warfare broadcasts, such as their timing, location and delivery methods.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

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.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

I doubt the North Koreans are going to care much about these loudspeaker broadcasts blaring again:

The presidential National Security Council (NSC) is expected to discuss a plan to resume propaganda campaigns via loudspeakers across the border with North Korea, in response to the North’s launch of some 600 balloons carrying trash to the South, a source close to the matter said Sunday.

The NSC meeting will be held Sunday afternoon and presided over by National Security Adviser Jang Ho-jin, according to the office of President Yoon Suk Yeol. 

Earlier in the day, South Korea’s military said North Korea has been sending the trash-carrying balloons to the South since Saturday, despite the South warning it would take “unendurably” painful measures against such provocative acts.

It marks the first time the presidential office will hold an NSC meeting over the North’s balloon provocation.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

I can remember over 20 years ago when North Korea was sending propaganda leaflets into South Korea and it appears we are going back to those times:

South Korea’s military said Tuesday it is vetting objects assumed to be propaganda leaflets distributed by North Korea.

“The military is taking measures after unidentified objects assumed to be North Korean propaganda leaflets were found in border areas in Gyeonggi and Gangwon provinces,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said in a notice sent to the press.

The JCS advised residents in the areas to refrain from accessing the objects and report to nearby military or police authorities in the event they discover such objects.

Earlier, North Korea warned of taking “tit-for-tat action” against the distribution of anti-Pyongyang leaflets in border areas.

“Mounds of wastepaper and filth will soon be scattered over the border areas and the interior of the ROK and it will directly experience how much effort is required to remove them,” Kim Kang-il, the North’s vice defense minister, said in a statement released via state media, using the acronym for South Korea’s official name.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

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.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.