hankyoreh

By Kang Tae-ho, senior staff writer

Gyeonggi Province police agency and Paju police decided to completely block Fighters for Free North Korea (FFNK), a North Korean defector organization, from launching pamphlet-filled balloons into North Korea from Imjingak near the DMZ on May 4 as they had planned.

The police are planning to mobilize 500 officers on May 4 to prevent members of the defector organization and residents of the area from entering Imjingak starting at 8 in the morning. The Ministry of Unification has also asked the organization to refrain from disseminating pamphlets to North Korea until the Kaesong situation has calmed down, sources say.

This is not the first time that the South Korean government has stopped the pamphlets from being flown into North Korea. In addition, the South Korean government has insisted that the pamphlets that have been launched by individual organizations are unconnected with the government and said that it is unfair, and completely unacceptable, for the North to use this as a reason to shift responsibility for the Kaesong crisis to the South.

But now the US-ROK Foal Eagle military exercises have come to an end. With a high degree of tension in inter-Korean relations because of the temporary shutdown of Kaesong, the decision by the South Korean government to announce in advance that they will be preventing the flyers from being launched could send a positive message to the North.

On Apr. 26, the spokesperson for the policy bureau of North Korea’s Defense Commission released a statement rejecting South Korea’s proposal for working-level talks about the Kaesong Complex. In the statement, Pyongyang criticized the proposal for talks as being nothing more than a cheap trick that lacked all substance, citing the Foal Eagle exercises and defector organizations who have launched balloons containing flyers into the North. North Korea was taking issue with the fact that FFNK had launched flyers from Gimpo, Gyeonggi Province, the day before the anniversary of the foundation of the Korean People’s Army.

North Korea’s statement specifically mentioned the fact that the defectors had appeared on TV to say that they had launched the flyers without any interference from the South Korean government. Arguing that South Korean government had protected and supported the act, the North said that it could not overlook this deed since it had “taken place in the open even as the mistress in the Blue House argues that North Korea should adhere to inter-Korean agreements.”

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