South Korean activists claim that they struggled with police while sending balloons across the North Korean border with anti-Pyongyang propaganda materials, defying their government’s orders to desist in light of the North’s warning of “deadly” punishment.
North Korean defector-turned-activist Park Sang-hak claimed that his group had launched roughly eight balloons from a location in the border town of Paju, South Korea, on Saturday night when police officers showed up and stopped them from launching their 12 additional balloons. In addition to seizing some of their items, Park claimed that police held him and three other group members after minor altercations with police before releasing them after questioning.
Requests for comment sent on Sunday to representatives of the Paju police and the northern Gyeonggi provincial police were not immediately answered.
In addition to propaganda materials like booklets praising South Korea’s economic prosperity and democratic society and hundreds of USB sticks containing videos of US Congress members criticising the North’s human rights record, the balloons flown toward North Korea also contained masks, Tylenol, and Vitamin C tablets, according to Park.
The phrase “Entire humanity denounces Kim Jong Un who threatens to preemptively strike (South Korea) with nuclear missiles” was written on one of the balloons, alluding to the North Korean leader’s expanding nuclear policy that is worsening tensions with its neighbours.
The South Korean administration had appealed with activists to cease their balloon launches weeks prior to Saturday’s launch, citing worries about the safety of people living near the border.
The South will “sternly reply,” according to Lee Hyo-jung, a spokesman for Seoul’s Unification Ministry, to any North Korean reprisals regarding the balloons.
The hostility between the Koreas has gotten worse this year as North Korea has increased its missile testing activity at a record rate and punctuated those tests with threats that it would use its nuclear weapons prophylactically in a variety of circumstances where it believes its leadership is in danger.
Because the majority of the population has limited access to foreign news, North Korea is very sensitive to criticism from the outside regarding the Kim family’s dictatorial rule over its citizens. It has criticised South Korea’s current conservative administration for allowing South Korean civilian activists to use balloons to transport anti-Pyongyang propaganda materials and other types of “dirty waste” across the border, even making dubious claims that the materials were to blame for the COVID-19 outbreak.
Park has been aggressively criticising the Kim family with leaflets and other propaganda material while flying helium-filled balloons for years. As Covid-19 emerged, he also started delivering vitamins, masks, and medications.
Under its previous liberal administration, which aimed to strengthen inter-Korean relations, South Korea implemented a divisive new law that made leafleting by citizens a crime last year.
According to Park’s attorney, Lee Hun, the trial has been postponed since he filed a petition asking the Constitutional Court to determine if the new law is unconstitutional. Park continued to launch balloons and became the first person to be charged under that law.
The law’s detractors claim that in an effort to strengthen connections with North Korea, it is abandoning South Korea’s right to free speech.
Supporters claim that the measure aims to protect frontline South Korean citizens and prevent needless agitating of North Korea.
North Korea expressed its ire over leafleting by firing at balloons approaching its territory in 2014 and by destroying an empty South Korean liaison office in the North in 2020. South Korean officials apprehended a North Korean spy who attempted to kill Park with a pen fitted with a poison needle in a failed assassination attempt in 2011.
Police and South Korean demonstrators fight over anti-Kim balloons.
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