DUELLING PROPAGANDA
Activists in South Korea have long sent balloons northwards, filled with anti-Pyongyang propaganda, cash, rice and Korean TV series on USB thumb drives.
These have always infuriated North Korea, whose government is extremely sensitive about its people gaining access to South Korean pop culture.
Kuensaem, another South Korean activist group, told AFP that it threw 500 plastic bottles into the sea on Friday near the border with North Korea.
The bottles were filled with rice, cash and a USB drive with the South Korean series “Crash Landing on You” – which features a romance between a wealthy South Korean heiress and a North Korean army officer.
“We were just doing what we’ve been doing for a long time to help North Koreans who are starving,” the group’s leader Park Jung-oh told AFP Saturday.
Tensions over the duelling propaganda have boiled over in dramatic fashion in the past.
In 2020, blaming the anti-North leaflets, Pyongyang unilaterally cut off all official military and political communication links with Seoul and blew up a disused inter-Korean liaison office on its side of the border.
Last year, South Korea’s Constitutional Court struck down a 2020 law that criminalised the sending of anti-Pyongyang propaganda, calling it an undue limitation on free speech.
Experts say there are now no legal grounds for the government to stop activists from sending balloons into North Korea.
South Korea’s unification ministry said on Saturday that the issue is “being approached in consideration” of the 2023 court decision.
Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister Kim Yo Jong mocked South Korea for complaining about the balloons last week, saying North Koreans were simply exercising their freedom of expression.
