South Korea announced on Monday that it will suspend a military agreement with North Korea to punish Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship for sending garbage and excrement across the border.
According to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, about 1,000 balloons have floated southward across the fortified border dividing the Korean peninsula since Thursday, eliciting an angry response from Seoul, which promised “unbearable” retaliation on Sunday. North Korea declared that it would stop shipping balloons hours after the threat over the weekend, but the South is apparently preparing to take punitive action anyhow.
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South Korea’s National Security Council announced the suspension of an inter-Korean agreement reached in 2018 to alleviate border tensions. The presidential council announced Tuesday that it would seek cabinet approval to suspend the agreement, noting that the suspension would allow South Korea’s military to conduct training near the border.
The agreement would be postponed “until mutual trust between the two Koreas is restored,” the presidential office stated.
Months of summit talks between the two countries in 2018 led to the formation of the accord, but since North Korea launched a spy satellite in November, it has been on the brink of collapse. South Korea partially halted the pact by resuming border surveillance flights, and Pyongyang accelerated the deal’s collapse by conducting artillery fire training along its western maritime boundary with the South in January.
According to the Associated Press, the pact obliged both sides to halt hostile acts against each other but did not explicitly prohibit civilian leafleting. This meant that activists in South Korea could continue to send balloons over the border into the North with anti-regime leaflets and USB sticks containing foreign news, causing outrage in Pyongyang.
The North’s balloons began arriving in the South last week after Kim Kang Il, North Korea’s vice defense minister, accused Seoul of “scattering leaflets and various dirty things near the border area” and threatened “tit-for-tat action” in return.
On Sunday, he said that North Korea had “scattered 15 tons of wastepaper, the favorite toy of the human scum, over the border areas” of South Korea. Kim Kang Il stated that Pyongyang would now “halt” the campaign because the South had gained “enough experience” with how “unpleasant” the balloons are and “how much effort” it takes to clean them up.
If the South continues to launch balloons, he added, “we will respond by intensively scattering wastepaper and rubbish 100 times the amount of scattered leaflets and the number of cases, as we have previously warned.”
