Conflicts: South Korea: North Korea sends garbage across the border with balloons

According to the South Korean military, North Korea has used balloons to send large amounts of garbage across the heavily fortified border into South Korea. According to reports, some of the balloons also had bags hanging from them that may have contained feces. The general staff in Seoul accused the isolated neighboring country on Wednesday of sending the balloons across the border since Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon (local time), around 260 such balloons had been discovered.

Last Sunday, North Korea, which is ruled by Kim Jong Un’s authoritarian regime, threatened to send “piles of waste paper and dirt” across the border regions. South Korea will notice “how much effort it takes to clear everything away,” said a statement by the Vice Minister of Defense. The measures will be a response to the sending of leaflets and garbage from South Korea.

For years, organizations of North Korean refugees in South Korea have repeatedly carried out propaganda campaigns at the border, sending out large gas balloons with leaflets calling, among other things, for the overthrow of the leadership in Pyongyang. North Korea has repeatedly reacted angrily to such campaigns. The leaflet campaigns are controversial in South Korea. North Korea itself has also sent propaganda leaflets across the border to South Korea in the past.

Under the previous liberal South Korean government, a law came into force in 2021 banning the sending of leaflets and other objects along the military demarcation line between the two countries. The Constitutional Court lifted the ban last year, arguing that it disproportionately restricted freedom of expression.