PYONGYANG STEPS UP PROPAGANDA WAR WITH SOUTH

North Korea is reinstalling propaganda loudspeakers along the border with the South amid growing hostilities between Pyongyang and Seoul.

The speakers, dismantled on both sides during a diplomatic thaw in 2018, have been set up again in “multiple places” inside the demilitarized zone, according to South Korea’s military.

“We are closely monitoring the North’s moves to wage psychological warfare,” an official source told the Yonhap news agency. From the end of the Korean War until a 2018 agreement, both sides blasted propaganda — and, from the South, K-pop songs — at each other.

The return to the broadcasts marks another escalation in tensions, stemming apparently from Pyongyang’s anger over defector groups sending messages and food parcels across the border using balloons. The North retaliated last week by blowing up an inter-korean liaison office set up in 2018 to foster better relations.

North Korea experts believe that while the regime has been angered by defector groups, the real cause of Pyongyang’s ire is the lack of progress with the South and the US over denuclearization in exchange for sanctions relief.