SEOUL: North Korea has floated hundreds more trash-filled balloons southward, Seoul’s military said Saturday ( Sep 7 ), the latest salvo in the two countries ‘ tit-for-tat campaigns of provocation and propaganda.
North Korea has launched more than 900 trash bubbles over the past three weeks, including about 190 later Friday, around 100 of which have now landed, primarily in Seoul and north Gyeonggi territory, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
According to the military, the bags that were attached to the bubbles contained “mostly papers and plastic waste,” adding that there was no danger for the general public from the luggage.
Since May, North Korea has sent almost 5, 000 trash-filled balloons west, claiming that they are retribution for advertising balloons that North Korean activists have flown north.
Seoul has resumed some advertising broadcasts from loudspeakers along the border and suspended a military package to ease tensions with Pyongyang in reaction.
The bubble detonations, according to Leif-Eric Easley, a teacher at Ewha University in Seoul, were a useless advertising campaign for North Korea.
Kim Yo-jong, leader Kim Jong Un’s girl and a vital program director, “may think that debris balloons compound political divisions in South Korea, but they do more to destroy North Korea’s global picture”, Easley said.
People of the South, but, are “annoyed by the appropriate clean-up activities and care about possible escalation”, he added.
” Pyongyang’s most sensible way out of the latest deadlock is for Pyongyang to resume politics with Seoul, conditioned on South Korean political groups voluntarily abstaining from balloon launches.”