Stinks: South Korea suspends peace deal with the North over trash balloons
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Annoyed with the ‘dirty tactics’ of its estranged sibling, South Korea announced on Monday to suspend a rapprochement deal with North Korea to punish it over its launching of trash-carrying balloons, even after the North said it would halt this campaign.
In 2020, North Korea had accused the South of sending balloons carrying the COVID-19 virus.
In recent days, the North unleashed hundreds of balloons to drop trash and manure on South Korea in an angry reaction against previous South Korean civilian leafleting campaigns, the media reported.
However, before North Korea abruptly announced to stop flying balloons across the tense border, South Korea, on Sunday, said it would take “unbearable” retaliatory steps.
After the Second World War ended in 1945, the Korean Peninsula was divided into two along its existing border, the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ). While the West supported the South, the then-Communist Moscow-Peking alliance supported the North.
On Monday, Seoul’s Presidential National Security Council decided to suspend a 2018 inter-Korean agreement envisaging easing frontline animosities, until mutual trust between the two Koreas is restored, the presidential office said.
The Security Council said the suspension would allow South Korea to resume military drills near the border with the North and take effective, immediate responses to provocations by the neighbor. A proposal on the suspension will be introduced at the Cabinet Council on Tuesday for approval.
South Korea favors suspension of the 2018 deal to restart anti-Pyongyang propaganda broadcasts, K-pop songs, and outside news from border loudspeakers, which have in the past stung in the rigidly controlled North, where most of its 26 million people are not allowed official access to foreign news.
The 2018 agreement, reached during a brief period of reconciliation between then-liberal South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, requires the Koreas to cease all hostile acts against each other, including bilateral propaganda broadcasts and leafleting campaigns across the borders.
But the accord is unclear if the civilian leafleting should also be banned. This loophole led South Korean activists to continue flying balloons to drop anti-Pyongyang leaflets, USB sticks with South Korean dramas and world news, and even US dollars in North Korea. Enraged over such leafleting campaigns, North Korea fired at incoming balloons and destroyed a South Korean-built, unoccupied inter-Korean liaison office in the North.
With the 2018 deal collapsing, tension spiked after North Korea’s spy satellite launch in November 2023 prompting both Koreas to take steps violating the accord. While South Korea resumed frontline aerial surveillance, North Korea restored border guard posts.
Since last Tuesday, nearly 1,000 North Korean balloons carrying manure, cigarette butts, scraps of cloth, and waste paper have been discovered in various parts of South Korea. No hazardous substances were, however, found, according to South Korea’s military.
On Sunday night, North Korean Vice Defense Minister Kim Kang Il said his country would stop its balloon campaign because it left the South Koreans with “enough experience of how much unpleasant we feel”. North Korea will fly balloons again if South Korean activists restart their own balloon activities.
North Korea’s balloon campaign, the first of its kind in seven years, is seen as triggering a divide in South Korea over its current conservative government’s tough policy against the North. Since 2022, North Korea has dramatically ramped up its weapons tests in what analysts call an attempt to bolster its nuclear capability and increase its leverage in future diplomacy with the US-led West.
