(SEOUL) South Korea’s military has resumed a campaign of loudspeakers aimed at North Korea in retaliation for Pyongyang’s repeated launches of debris-laden balloons into the South, it announced on Friday.
North Korea launched a new launch of 200 balloons toward its southern neighbor on Thursday, the eighth since May, Seoul said.
“We have repeatedly and seriously warned of North Korea’s continued release of debris balloons,” South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.
After these warnings, from Thursday evening to Friday morning, “our armed forces broadcast propaganda broadcasts to the north through loudspeakers,” the civil servants added.
The propaganda broadcasts against the North Korean regime near the border are the first since South Korea began its broadcasts on June 9 for the first time in six years in response to Pyongyang’s balloon releases, a defense ministry spokesman told AFP.
Nuclear-armed North Korea has fired more than a thousand balloons into the South in retaliation for a campaign of balloons sent by South Korean militants into the North against the regime of Kim Jong-un.
Following this “balloon war”, Seoul warned in June that it would completely suspend a military agreement aimed at reducing tensions between the two countries and resume loudspeaker propaganda along the border.
According to South Korean agency Yonhap, Seoul broadcast information on BTS, K-pop megastars’ songs and global sales of Samsung mobile phones in North Korea on June 9.
An isolated country, North Korea seeks to deny its people access to South Korean popular culture, such as K-pop or K-drama series.
In 2022, a North Korean citizen was executed by Pyongyang for possessing cultural material from the South.
Sonic propaganda, a tactic dating back to the 1950-1953 Korean War, angers Pyongyang, which has threatened to target South Korean loudspeakers with its artillery.
Relations between the two Koreas are currently at an all-time low as the North increases its tests and provocations and tries to move closer to Russia.
Seoul recently resumed live-fire drills near its border with the North.
