The government of North Korea said on Sunday it will stop sending balloons loaded with trash and manure into South Korea, ostensibly because the regime in Pyongyang thinks the trash balloon campaign accomplished its objectives.
South Korea was not mollified, and said on Monday it will suspend a 2018 military pact as the first of its “unendurable” retaliatory measures.
North Korea began sending hundreds of balloons across the border on Wednesday carrying payloads of trash and feces.
Pyongyang described this nauseating campaign as a “tit-for-tat” response to South Korean groups that send leaflets, banned videos, and other material to North Korea with balloons. North Korea has lobbed swarms of balloons into South Korea before, but it has been seven years since the last balloon campaign and this one was larger and more disgusting.
Kim Yo-jong, sister to North Korea’s dictator and a prominent spokeswoman for the regime, sneered that North Korea was merely “exercising its freedom of expression” by dropping bags of garbage on South Korea.
“Once you experience how nasty and exhausting it feels to go around picking up dirty filth, you will realize that you shouldn’t talk about freedom of expression so easily when it comes to [spreading leaflets] in border areas,” she said.
“We will make it clear that we will respond with 10 more times the amount of filth to what the [South Koreans] spray to us in the future,” she threatened.
On Sunday morning, the ROK military said it found over 700 more balloons carrying loads of garbage. None of the unpleasant payloads were deemed hazardous by the chemical and biological hazard teams that inspected them.
North Korean Vice Defense Minister Kim Kang II said on Sunday night that North Korea will suspend the trash balloon campaign, but is prepared to resume if South Korean groups send more propaganda leaflets over the border.
“We made the ROK clans get enough experience of how unpleasant they feel, and how much effort is needed to remove the scattered wastepaper,” said Kim in a statement broadcast by North Korean state media.
Kim boasted North Korea sent a total of 15 tons of garbage into South Korea carried by 3,500 balloons.
South Korean National Security Director Chang Ho-jin said North Korea’s balloon swarms, and its concurrent jamming of South Korean GPS signals, were “absurd, irrational acts of provocation that a normal country can’t imagine.”
Chang said North Korea would face “unbearable” retaliation for its efforts to create “public anxieties and chaos.” The first response came on Monday, as South Korea announced plans to suspend a military pact signed with North Korea in 2018, pending approval by the Cabinet.
The ROK’s National Security Council said suspending the agreement will allow South Korea to resume military training near the border and prepare “sufficient and immediate measures” to any further provocations from Pyongyang.
The 2018 pact, probably the most substantial achievement to emerge from inter-Korean negotiations during the Trump administration, has already been largely voided by Pyongyang. North Korea has already moved troops and weapons back to the border, as South Korea now intends to do. South Korea also suspended part of the agreement in November 2023 after North Korea claimed to have successfully launched a spy satellite.
The office of President Yoon Suk-yeol said on Monday that North Korea’s provocative actions have “negatively impacted the military’s readiness posture” and fully suspending the 2018 agreement is the only way to restore it.
Another possible South Korean response to the trash balloons could be resuming the use of loudspeakers to broadcast news, music, and criticism of the North’s human rights abuses across the border.
North Korea despises such broadcasts because it strives to keep its impoverished subjects isolated from the outside world. The loudspeakers were shut down as part of the 2018 agreements.
Rep. Tae Yong-ho, a South Korean politician who defected from North Korea, said last year that loudspeaker messages audible to his border guards are what dictator Kim Jong-un “fears the most.”
“History has proven that loudspeaker broadcasting to North Korea is the quickest and most effective way to peacefully manage the situation along the border and deter war,” said Tae, who at the time was arguing for the loudspeakers to resume as punishment for North Korea sending drones into South Korean airspace.
