Balloon wars: soaring tensions in the Koreas
The “crap attack” is what they’re calling it, said Robert King on Korea Economic Institute of America (Washington). Over a week-long period ending early this month, North Korea released more than 1,000 huge balloons carrying “manure, cigarette butts, used batteries” and other rubbish across the “demilitarised zone” into South Korea. Some were heavy enough to smash car windscreens; others were equipped with timers designed to get the bags to pop open in mid-air and scatter their contents. The blitz was retaliation for an earlier leaflet campaign organised by Fighters for a Free North Korea, a group of North Korean defectors living in the South, who in early May had sent 300,000 flyers tethered to balloons across the border, said Kang Seung-woo in The Korea Times (Seoul). And another “200,000 leaflets, US $1 bills and USB sticks containing K-pop songs” were duly sent from South Korea in a tit-for-tat reply for the “crap attack”, only to be answered by 300 more rubbish-loaded balloons from the North. Seoul has now vowed to resume loudspeaker broadcasts of pop music and anti-North Korean propaganda across the border for the first time in six years.
This balloon war isn’t a first, said The Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo). It’s a bizarre reminder of a little-known conflict in the Second World War, when the Imperial Japanese Army made use of strong easterly winds to send bombs suspended from balloons made of “washi”, traditional Japanese paper, to the US. Some 9,000 were deployed; only 10% made it across the Pacific, but they still caused fires and killed six Americans. In fact, balloons have often been used in flare-ups between the two Koreas, said The Chosun Ilbo (Seoul): North and South launched millions of leaflets into each other’s air space via balloon during the Cold War. Today, however, the risk of escalation is that much greater, said The Hankyoreh (Seoul). Seoul had banned sending leaflets into North Korea, but that was struck down last year by the constitutional court on freedom of speech grounds. Pyongyang, a nuclear power in the grip of an economic crisis, is an increasingly unpredictable actor. “If we’re not careful, both Koreas will be annihilated.”
For now, thankfully, the mood in South Korea is calm, said Choe Sang-Hun in The New York Times. On social media, people are happily posting pictures of the North Korean balloons stuck in trees, streets or fields. But in an “ominous undertone”, Seoul has urged people not to touch the balloons and to report them at once to the military, whose officers, clad in biohazard and bombdisposal gear, have been seen inspecting the rubbish piles. North Korea has large stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, which its agents famously deployed to assassinate Kim Jong Un’s estranged half-brother, Kim Jong Nam. So far, no real damage has been done – but the resumption of Cold War-era hostilities between the two Koreas doesn’t bode well for a peaceful future.