South Korea installed massive loudspeakers on its border with North Korea and broadcast news, political messages, and pop music for the first time in a decade on Sunday in response to Pyongyang dumping hundreds of balloons filled with feces and trash over its neighbor this month.
The North Korean government began a filth balloon campaign against the South last month in response to independent activists, often including North Korean defectors, in the South restarting campaigns in which they use balloons to float pamphlets with news of the outside world and political content into the repressive North. Leftist former President Moon Jae-in, banned leaflet drops, outraging free speech and anti-communist activists, but a South Korean constitutional court overturned the ban in September.
The South Korean military used an “air raid warning” to inform residents of Gyeonggi province, near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), in late May of an incoming swarm of balloons. Leaders of the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) counted an estimated 260 balloons dropped into the South’s border region during the first few rounds of invading balloons and warned residents to stay away, fearing that the balloons were poisonous or otherwise dangerous to locals.
Following research on the balloons, Seoul confirmed that they contained conventional trash waste and feces, not radioactive or poisonous materials. Kim’s sister, senior North Korean official Kim Yo-jong, confirmed North Korea’s intent to retaliate against political leaflet campaigns and vowed to continue sending “filth” balloons if necessary in a message on North Korean state media.
“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 [spreading leaflets] in border areas,” Kim Yo-jong declared.
South Korea initially responded to the drops by suspending a 2018 military agreement on June 2. South Korean National Security Director Chang Ho-jin decried the drops as “absurd, irrational acts of provocation that a normal country can’t imagine” and vowed an “unbearable” countermeasure.
North Korea repeated its balloon intimidation this weekend, dropping a third round of trash balloons over the Southern border areas. According to the JCS, our of hundreds of trash balloons launched, only about 80 made it into South Korea.
The South Korean National Security Council (NSC) then announced the expected countermeasure.
“The responses we take may be difficult for the North Korean regime to endure, but will deliver news of light and hope to the North’s military and residents,” the NSC said in a press release prior to the broadcast on Sunday. “We make it clear that the intensifying tension between the two Koreas is entirely the responsibility of the North.”
The communist regime for decades has made the consumption of any media not created by the state illegal for residents, but it cannot control whether North Koreans can hear broadcasts from the South, outraging Kim officials. South Korean governments have traditionally used the broadcasts, which began in 1963, to share forbidden news of the success of the South’s economy, political information banned in the North, and outlawed South Korean pop culture, such as “K-pop” music and audio of Korean television programs.
According to the South’s Korea JoongAng Daily, Sunday’s broadcast began with the Southern national anthem and a program titled “Voice of Freedom” that lasted two hours and contained news and political information from the outside.
“It delivered the news that South Korea, the United States and Japan strongly condemned North Korea’s continued missile provocations and growing military cooperation with Russia at a regular council meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” another South Korean outlet, the Yonhap news agency, reported. “It also introduced that Samsung Electronics came first in smartphone shipments out of 38 countries around the world.”
The broadcast also included multiple hit singles by South Korea’s most popular band, BTS, including the Grammy-nominated songs “Butter” and “Dynamite.”
The use of BTS in the propaganda broadcast could be interpreted as a military threat: the band is currently on hiatus as all of its members are fulfilling the mandatory 18-month military service all men in South Korea must complete. The band’s first member to enter the military, Jin, is expected to complete his service this month.
JoongAng Daily reported on Monday that the JCS documented some evidence that North Korea may be installing loudspeakers of its own on the border. It also confirmed that no broadcasts were scheduled for Monday, but the military was “ready to resume the broadcasts immediately if North Korea engages in despicable behavior.”
Kim Yo-jong published another missive on Sunday threatening more balloon drops.
“Our counteraction (of sending balloons) was to end on the 9th, but the situation has changed … The loudspeaker broadcast provocation has finally begun in border areas,” she wrote, according to Yonhap. “This is a prelude to a very dangerous situation.”
“If South Korea chooses to engage in the leaflet-scattering and loudspeaker provocations across the border, without a doubt, they will witness our new response,” Kim promised.
The eccentric exchange is the latest sign that the tenuous stability achieved on the inter-Korean border following former American President Donald Trump’s meetings with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has largely ended as Kim changed his government policies to be more belligerent towards conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and leftist American President Joe Biden. While Moon was more conciliatory to Kim, and Trump made peace on the Korean peninsula a priority, Yoon has taken a more hardline stance against the nuclear-armed communists with minimal interest from the Biden administration.
Kim announced in January that Pyongyang would no longer address South Korea as a rogue province of the communist North, but rather a hostile foreign state. Kim referred to South Korea by its formal name, the “Republic of Korea” (ROK), defying precedent in state media to refer to the country only as “south Korea,” implying that it was not a state independent of North Korea.
“The ROK scums are our principal enemy,” Kim declared. “While we will not unilaterally decide on a major upheaval in the Korean peninsula through the overwhelming force of ours, we also have no intention of avoiding war.”
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