Seoul, South Korea
CNN
—
South Korean activists despatched balloons carrying Ok-pop and Ok-dramas on USB sticks to their northern neighbor on Thursday, days after North Korean balloons of trash and “filth” floated in the other way.
The activist group Fighters for a Free North Korea (FFNK) launched the enormous balloons within the early hours of Thursday morning, with movies displaying them floating away, some dragging big posters seen from afar whereas others carried smaller plastic packages.
Inside the packages had been 200,000 leaflets condemning North Korean chief Kim Jong Un, 5,000 USB sticks containing South Korean music movies and tv exhibits, and a couple of,000 one greenback payments, based on FFNK.
Teams comparable to FFNK have been sending these sorts of balloons for years, carrying gadgets prohibited within the remoted totalitarian dictatorship – together with meals, drugs, radios, propaganda leaflets and items of South Korean information.
In Could, North Korea responded by sending its personal big balloons again south – containing trash, soil, items of paper and plastic, and what South Korean authorities described as “filth.”
Pyongyang claimed to have despatched a complete of 3,500 balloons carrying 15 tonnes of trash to its neighbor, based on state media KCNA, citing North Korea’s Vice Protection Minister Kim Kang Il.
These balloons started touchdown within the South final week, briefly disrupting flights and prompting authorities to warn residents to remain indoors. As of Monday, the South Korean navy had discovered about 1,000 balloons.
South Korean activists say they may proceed to ship the balloons north – though doing so was banned by the federal government years in the past.
FFNK chief Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector who fled to the South years in the past, described the supplies they despatched as “letters of reality and freedom.”
As a younger man in North Korea, these balloons had provided him a uncommon glimpse into the skin world, he mentioned. He recalled being in a public sq. in 1992 when “I heard an enormous balloon within the sky.”
“This spherical factor all of a sudden popped with a loud bang, then leaflets fell from the sky. I knew I wasn’t supposed to have a look at these issues, so I put one in my pocket and went to the lavatory to test it out,” he mentioned.
The leaflet he pocketed contained tales about North Korean defectors and their escapes, a few of whom had crossed into China earlier than heading towards South Korea.
Eight years later, Park fled the North – arriving in South Korea in 2000, and starting his mission to ship balloons throughout the border in 2006.
The leaflets he sends carry details about the Kim household, together with the assassination of the chief’s half-brother Kim Jong Nam — in addition to booklets about South Korea’s financial and political improvement, together with images of the primary Seoul airport and the nation’s fighter jets.
“South Korea is just not an American colony or a wasteland of humanity like I realized in North Korea,” he informed CNN on Wednesday. “We despatched cash, drugs, information, reality, and love, however to ship filth and trash in return? That’s an inhumane and barbaric act.”
In the meantime, some South Korean residents residing close to the border at the moment are on edge.
“I lived by way of the Korean Battle and different difficulties, and I used to be nervous … What if now we have one other warfare?” mentioned 84-year-old Tune Kwang-ja, a resident of Yongin metropolis, on Thursday.
“That jogged my memory of the previous days. I nonetheless get goosebumps pondering and speaking about it,” she mentioned, including that the balloons “felt like a infantile prank.”
The incident has additionally worsened strained relations between the 2 nations. South Korea introduced this week it will resume “all navy actions” close to the demarcation line – suspending a 2018 settlement signed by each nations at a short time of comparatively heat relations.
