Large white balloons carrying plastic bags of North Korean trash and excrement were flown into South Korea as a form of dirty protest.
The North Korean toxic trade came on Wednesday in the form of 260 large air deliveries that triggered emergency warnings to border town residents about “suspicious objects” floating in the sky. It was payback after a South Korean activist group sent 300,000 anti-regime leaflets and thousands of USB drives containing K-pop music over the border.
Some of the balloons, which traveled more than 180 miles, made smooth landings on streets, but the majority burst, spilling their contents on sidewalks, trees, and roofs.
Just a few days earlier, a North Korean vice defense minister, seething over the leaflets and K-pop introduction to the closed-off country, vowed the country would soon heap “mounds of waste paper and filth” onto its southern neighbor, state media reported.
The dirty airdrops were so South Korea would “directly experience how much effort is required to remove” the balloons, the vice minister said.
North Korea’s 40-year-old dictator, Kim Jong Un, has vowed to crack down on foreign media consumption, which apparently applies to globally known boy bands such as BTS. Glimpses of freedom, including choreographed hip thrusts and arm movements from 20-something-year-olds, risk showing North Koreans what they are missing, the regime fears.
In 2021, North Korea publicly executed several of its citizens after they watched K-pop music videos, according to a report by the Transitional Justice Working Group.
And apparently, few things anger North Korea more than leaflet-carrying balloons, which Kim’s rigid regime views as psychological warfare and has in the past tried to shoot down.
In fact, when COVID-19 started to spread in North Korea, Kim blamed balloons, claiming his people had become infected after touching “alien things,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector who sent the anti-regime balloons, said his launches can sometimes land 250 miles over the inter-Korean border. The leaflets urged North Koreans to rise up against Kim.
“We send medicine and leaflets carrying the truth,” Park, of the Seoul-based Fighters for a Free North Korea, told the Wall Street Journal. “How inhumane is it that they send filth in return?”
Kim Yo Jong, the North Korean leader’s powerful sister, went on state media to mock a South Korean military statement demanding that North Korea stop its “inhumane and vulgar activity.”
She argued her country was merely exercising its freedom of expression, which the Seoul government has stated as a reason for its inability to stop anti-North Korean activists from flying leaflets across the border.
“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 [leafleting] in border areas,” she said. “We will make it clear that we will respond with tens more times the amount of filth to what the [South Koreans] spray to us in the future.”
The balloon assault came as Kim urged his military scientists to overcome a failed satellite launch. He also urged them to develop space-based reconnaissance capabilities, which he claimed was vital to keeping the U.S. and South Korean military activities at bay.
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Addressing the launch failure, he also warned about “overwhelming actions” against South Korea over a military exercise involving 20 fighter jets near the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
He did not cite specifics but described the South Korean response as a “hysterical attack formation flight and strike drill” and “direct military challenge” toward North Korea, the state-run Korean Central News Agency said Wednesday.