North Korea slams ‘psychological warfare’ as South repeals ban on anti-Pyongyang leaflets

The warning by the Korean Central News Agency’s (KCNA) on Wednesday underscores Pyongyang’s growing concern that the South’s conservative government would resume “psychological warfare” through such propaganda leaflets and loudspeakers near the border, analysts said.

“Leaflet launches irritate the North the most, as the leaflets contain content that could undermine Kim Jong-un’s authority and legitimacy,” Cho Han-bum, a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), told This Week in Asia.

Activists in South Korea have increasingly come up with sophisticated ways of spreading leaflets, including sending “smart balloons” capable of releasing leaflets at intervals over different areas in the North, making it almost impossible for Pyongyang’s military to respond in time, Cho said.

Will US move to quash North Korean propaganda bring about a ‘revolution’?

In comments attributed to a North Korean political commentator, KCNA on Wednesday warned that Pyongyang would consider leafleting to be akin to “pre-emptive attack conducted before a start of war”.

The state news agency claimed that future leafleting campaigns in the South could trigger an unprecedented response from North Korea’s military, which it said stood ready to “pour a shower of shells” towards the sites where the leaflets were launched, as well as the “bulwark of the region of [South Korean] puppets”.

Yang Moo-jin, a political-science professor of the University of North Korean Studies, said however that the statements issued by KCNA usually carried much less weight than those of government agencies or the military.

“We don’t need to overreact to this statement. If such a statement comes from the military joint chiefs of staff, we would have to worry about possible military actions by the North,” he said.

A North Korean official document issued in May reportedly said Pyongyang banned its citizens from touching such leaflets, and accused the South of “transmitting objects that pose a risk of coronavirus transmission”.

03:15

US soldier held in North Korea: What happened to Americans detained by Pyongyang in the past?

US soldier held in North Korea: What happened to Americans detained by Pyongyang in the past?

In October 2014, the North used machine guns to shoot down balloons from the South that carried leaflets criticising the Pyongyang regime, and the South retaliated by firing back across the border. Some North Korean bullets landed in the South, but no one was hurt.

The North also blew up an inter-Korean liaison office in its border town of Kaesong in 2020, in a show of anger over the propaganda leaflets. Later that year, South Korea legislated the Development of Inter-Korean Relations Act to stop the leafleting campaigns, about six months after Kim Yo-jong, the powerful sister of the North’s leader, threatened to scrap the 2018 no-hostility military pact with the South in protest of the leaflet campaign.

In a separate statement, KCNA on Wednesday lambasted visits to Seoul by top US officials as a “field inspection” by “war zealots”.

North Korea likely to claim US soldier ‘defected from imperialist America’

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday arrived in Seoul for talks on North Korea, the defence alliance and regional issues, and US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin plans to attend annual bilateral defence ministerial talks next week.

“The provocative behaviour of the United States brings up the impression of war zealots who have embarked on a field inspection for a second Korean War,” Kim Myong-chol, an international affairs critic from North Korea, said in a commentary by KCNA.

Blinken and Lloyd’s visits will bring about “new war clouds” in the Asia-Pacific region, the commentator said, stressing that it depends on Washington’s behaviour whether new geopolitical risks will form in the region.

Additional reporting by the Associated Press