hankyoreh

Images of North Koreans preparing propaganda leaflets to be launched into South Korea, published by the Rodong Sinmun on June 20. (Yonhap News)

For the past few days, South and North Korea have been in a heated confrontation over the launches of balloons containing propaganda leaflets. North Korea has begun preparing for a large-scale launch of “retaliatory leaflets” in response to leaflets that have been launched into North Korea by defector groups. The defector group Fighters for Free North Korea (FFNK) is planning to launch an additional 1 million leaflets around the 70th anniversary of the Korean War’s outbreak on June 25. Both sides need to immediately call off this “battle of the leaflets,” which is anachronistic and does no one any good.

On June 20, the South Korean Ministry of Unification urged North Korea to call off its plans to scatter leaflets. But the dissemination plans were reaffirmed on June 21 in a statement by a spokesperson for the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) United Front Department, which stressed that Pyongyang has no intention of changing its plans now that inter-Korean relations have been irrevocably damaged and that Seoul will only understand the antipathy and displeasures the North is feeling right now once it has experienced the exact same thing.

The South Korean public’s opposition to the leaflet launches played a large part in the defector group Keun Saem (Big Spring)’s decision on June 19 to postpone the planned send plastic water bottles containing rice to North Korea. The South Korean government is cracking down hard on the leaflet balloon launches by defector groups, while the Democratic Party is working on legislation to ban the leaflets.

North Korea may well be upset over the belated response from the South. But its decision to respond with its own leaflet scattering in South Korea poses the danger of propelling inter-Korean relations into even more wasteful conflict. FFNK should also cancel its plans for leaflet launches in light of public opinion against allowing them to become the fuel for an inter-Korean clash.

Leaflets are nothing but bad news for inter-Korean relations, whether they’re being disseminated in the South or North. The content disclosed by the North for its South Korea leaflets is especially troubling. The overt mockery and insults directed at President Moon Jae-in suggest that it has misread the internal situation in the South. The leaflets pose a serious risk of alienating even those South Koreans who support inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation.

Also problematic is the fact that North Korean authorities are orchestrating the leaflet launches. In the South Korean case, the leaflets have been scattered by a small number of defector groups. The North Korean leaflets have been portrayed as “in answer to the public’s indignation,” but its approach amounts to North Korean society as a whole embarking on a large-scale, out-in-the-open leaflet scattering campaign.

The calls for hardline measures recently coming from South Korean and US conservatives are troubling as well. The US has dispatched strategic bombers to the East Sea, and conservatives have seized the moment to call for the deployment of US strategic weapons around the Korean Peninsula, the resumption of joint South Korea-US military exercises, Seoul’s participation in the Washington’s missile defense network, and postponement of the transfer of wartime operational control (OPCON) to South Korea. We cannot allow them to use the leaflet scattering by South and North as an excuse for raising tensions on the Korean Peninsula. The South and North Korean leaflet launches are nothing but foolishness and a threat to peace on the Korean Peninsula and the lives of people on both sides.

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