North Korea launched a second wave of trash-filled balloons toward South Korea after a similar campaign just a few days earlier. It might seem like the North is simply trying to irritate their rival neighbors – and that’s no doubt a factor – but the balloons have a deep historical context in Korea.
Over the past weekend, around 600 balloons flown from North Korea have been found in various parts of South Korea, as reported by the Associated Press. No dangerous substances were found in the balloons – just a collection of cigarette butts, scraps of cloth, waste paper, plastic, and other day-to-day garbage.
The news comes less than a week after 260 balloons filled with manure and other trash were sent from North Korea to South Korea on Tuesday night.
North Korea has confirmed they are behind the balloon launches, which they claim is in response to South Korea’s long-running campaign of sending balloons across the border loaded with anti-Pyongyang propaganda.
“Mounds of wastepaper and filth will soon be scattered over the border areas and the interior [of South Korea]. It will directly experience how much effort is required to remove them,” Kim Kang Il, a vice defense minister of North Korea, said in a statement on Saturday, according to the New York Times.
North Korea has said it will now stop sending trash-filled balloons across the border to South Korea, but it has threatened to resume the operations if South Korean dares to send any.
Balloon propaganda campaigns have been used in Korea since the Korean War of 1950 to 1953, the civil conflict-come-proxy war that divided the nation in two. For decades, South Koreans have sent across material about the outside world and the realities of North Korea’s authoritarian regime, as well as Bibles, dollar bills, and USB drives containing South Korean TV shows. Meanwhile, the North would respond with anti-South Korean material, such as cartoons of their leaders cozying up to Americans.
In 2020, the South Korean government banned people from sending anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets to North Korea as part of a wider push towards inter-Korean engagement after decades of hostility. However, in recent years, some of Seoul’s top courts have pushed back against the law, claiming it infringes on free speech.
In the past few years, inter-Korean relations have arguably been at the lowest since the Korean War – and the latest flurry of balloons from North Korea isn’t helping. In response to the latest load of balloons, the South Korean National Security Council fully suspended the 2018 inter-Korean reduction pact “until mutual trust between the two Koreas is restored.”
