SEOUL: North Korea launched 720 bubbles across the country’s most heavily armed frontier over Saturday, hitting South Korea with their loads: plastic bags full of cigar butts and other debris.
Around 1, 000 of these debris bubbles have been sent by North Korea across the Demilitarized Zone, which separates the two Koreas, since last Tuesday. When the kites landed in South Asian airspace, their schedules released the plastic bags containing various items of garbage, including used paper and fabric pieces.
Original rumors that the balloons were carrying people waste were refuted by the North Korean military, but it did point out that some of the garbage appeared to be compost.
So far, officials in the South have found “nothing dangerous” in the cargo. President Yoon Suk Yeol’s business accused North Korea of “dirty actions that no ordinary nation did think of” on Sunday. South Korea began” measures that North Korea would get intolerable” according to the statement.
Kim Jong Un, the North’s head, has found K-pop songs so dangerous that he once called it a “vicious cancer,” and its representatives indicated that they might turn on their loudspeakers along the inter-Korean border to hum it.
The North has characterized the floating unpleasant as “tit-for-tat motion.” In recent days, it has accused North Korean defectors who reside in South Korea of” spattering flyers and several dirty points” over its border regions.
Here’s what to know about the strange offensive.
It has been disconcerting but never destructive.
When South Korea reports things coming from North Korea, they typically come from missiles carrying satellites or nuclear weapons designed to defuse nuclear weapons. However, the North’s actions over the past year have been a rehashing of a Cold War technique: using advertising balloons as psychological war.
When the authorities incorrectly warned people near the border of an “air attack,” the balloon offensive last week sparked some misunderstandings and common problems.
The event was largely ignored by South Koreans, who continued to be peaceful and who saw it as irksome antics from the North. People posted photos of the North Korean bubbles in trees, on land, or on trash-filled industrial streets on social press. According to images captured by local news media, one plastic carrier dropped from a balloon was large enough to obliterate the car of a parked car.
However, South Korea’s advice to people not to touch the kites and report them to specialists right away had an ominous tone. North Korea is known to have a large stockpile of biological and chemical arms, which its officials used to attack Kim’s separated third brother, Kim Jong Nam.
Officers clad in hazard and bomb-disposing gear were seen inspecting the garbage piles in photos and video images released by the North Korean military on Sunday.
The bubble conflict goes back generations.
North and South Korea engaged in emotional conflict during the Cold War. They attempted to influence one another’s people through propaganda-heavy shortwave radio broadcasts. Monitors bombarded foe soldiers with misinformation songs all night long along the DMZ. Posters urged the men to defect to a “people’s heaven” in the North or to the “free and political” South.
And the two Koreas launched pamphlet- riddled balloons into each other’s airport. On the Asian Peninsula, there were countless copies of these pamphlets that disparaged the government of the other side. Both Koreas forbid their citizens from reading or keeping these documents. When they found the flyers in the rocks and reported them, authorities in the South gave prizes to children who had found them in the form of crayons and other school items.
But until very late, balloons from North Korea sometimes carried typical trash.
A court ruling made it possible for the balloons to journey once more.
By the 1990s, it was evident that the North’s advertising was losing its importance as the South’s business pulled back. While the North struggled with severe food shortages and focused on a character cult and a full information blackout to manage its citizens, the South had grown prosperous and had become a major export force.
The two Koreas came to an agreement to end government-sponsored efforts to influence each other’s members when their officials held their first inter-Korean conference in 2000. However, North Korean defectors and North Korean liberal and Christian activists continued the information war by sending balloons filled with mini-Bibles, transistor radios, medical supplies, computer thumb drives with K-pop music and drama, and flyers designating Kim as a “pig”.
To them, their loads contained” truth” and “freedom of representation” that would help arouse North Koreans from their president’s hypnosis. To Pyongyang, they were nothing more than political “filth”, and North Korean leaders vowed to retaliate in kind.
Then, according to the government in Seoul, a law prohibiting the distribution of leaflets to the North, saying that they did little more than provoke Pyongyang. But a few years later, in 2023, a court ruled the law unconstitutional, and last month activists resumed launching balloons.
” We have tried something they have always been doing, but I cannot understand why they are making a fuss as if they were hit by a shower of bullets”, Kim Yo Jong, Kim’s sister and spokesperson, said last week. ” If they experience how unpleasant the feeling of picking up filth is and how tired it is, they will know that it is not easy to dare talk about freedom of expression.”
