SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea criticized rival South Korea on Wednesday for eradicating a regulation that banned personal activists from sending anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets to the North, insisting that such actions quantity to psychological warfare and threatening to reply with a “bathe of shells.”
The assertion printed by North Korea’s official Korean Central Information Company was the primary time state media commented on the September resolution by South Korea’s Constitutional Court docket to invalidate a 2020 regulation that criminalized leafleting. The choice was based mostly on issues that it excessively restricted free speech.
The ruling got here in response to a grievance filed by North Korean defector-activists within the South. They included Park Sang-hak, who has been a frequent goal of the North Korean authorities’s anger for his yearslong marketing campaign of flying leaflets throughout the border with big balloons.
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Park and different defectors from the North for years have used big helium-filled balloons to launch leaflets criticizing the management of North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un, his nuclear weapons ambitions and the nation’s dismal human rights file. The leaflets are sometimes packaged with U.S. greenback payments and USB sticks containing details about world information.
North Korea is extraordinarily delicate about any outdoors try and undermine Kim’s authoritarian management as he maintains tight management over the nation’s 26 million individuals whereas severely proscribing their entry to international information.
The regulation, crafted by the earlier liberal authorities in Seoul that pursued inter-Korean engagement, was handed six months after the North expressed its frustration over the leaflets by blowing up an inter-Korean liaison workplace within the North Korean border city of Kaesong in June 2020.
Tensions between the Koreas are at their highest level years because the tempo of each Kim’s weapons exams and the South Korea’s mixed army workout routines with the US have intensified in a tit-for-tat cycle.
In feedback attributed to a political commentator, KCNA warned that the North would think about leafleting “high-level psychological warfare” and even a “preemptive assault performed earlier than a begin of battle.”
“Underneath the current state of affairs the place a spark might result in explosion, there is no such thing as a assure that such army conflicts as in Europe and the Center East wouldn’t escape on the Korean Peninsula,” KCNA mentioned, apparently referring to Russia’s battle on Ukraine and the violence in Israel and Gaza.
The company claimed that future leafleting campaigns might set off an unprecedented response from North Korea’s army, which stands able to “pour a bathe of shells” towards the websites the place the leaflets are launched, in addition to the “bulwark of the area of (South) Korean puppets.”
Whereas North Korea usually makes weird threats that aren’t carried out, the feedback nonetheless mirrored the animosity between the rival Koreas amid a protracted freeze in diplomacy.
The assertion got here hours earlier than U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was to reach in Seoul for talks with allies on the rising menace posed by North Korea’s army nuclear program and Pyongyang’s rising alignment with Russia. North Korea has been supplying artillery shells and different munitions to Russia in current months to gasoline its battle efforts in Ukraine, U.S. and South Korean officers have mentioned, and so they suspect that Kim might be in search of Russian applied sciences and different help in return to improve his personal army. Each Pyongyang and Moscow have denied the accusations that North Korea has been offering Russia with munitions.
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In a separate article, the KCNA condemned the deliberate visits to South Korea by Blinken and U.S. Secretary of Protection Lloyd Austin, who travels to Seoul the next week, describing them as “warmongers” bringing a “new battle cloud” to Asia.
Blinken was in Tokyo on Tuesday collaborating within the second and remaining day of the Group of seven International Minister talks, the place the senior diplomats “strongly condemned” North Korea’s ballistic missile exams in addition to its alleged arms transfers to Russia, that are each in violation of U.N. Safety Council resolutions in opposition to the North, based on Japan’s International Ministry.
In 2022, the North blamed its COVID-19 outbreak on balloons flown from South Korea — a extremely questionable declare that gave the impression to be an try to carry its rival accountable amid rising tensions over its nuclear weapons program.
North Korea additionally fired at propaganda balloons flying towards its territory in 2014. South Korea then returned hearth, however there have been no casualties.
In his newest launch on Sept. 20, Park mentioned he flew 20 balloons carrying 200,000 leaflets and 1,000 USB sticks from the South Korean border island of Ganghwa.