#North Korea plans to launch anti-South Korea leaflets in propaganda war

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Park Sang-Hak, a North Korean defector living in the South and the leader of an anti-North Korea civic group, holds a balloon containing leaflets denouncing Kim Jong Un.
Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters

North Korea has decided to take a leaflet out of South Korea’s playbook.

Outraged officials in the Hermit Kingdom are sick of the anti-regime propaganda leaflets that have been launched in balloons and bottles by North Korean defectors from the south for years.

To get back at Seoul, and by extension its ally the US, North Koreans have amassed a pile of leaflets “as big as a mountain” denouncing South Korea and North Korean defectors that they will launch southward soon, state news agency KCNA reported Friday.

Tension flared on the Korean peninsula last week when Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un’s younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, ordered a liaison office between the two countries blown up and threatened military action against the south.

South Korea’s military stopped sending anti-North propaganda over the border in 2010.

But several groups led by defectors, including some aided by allies in the US, have long sent flyers along with food, dollar bills, mini radios and USB sticks of South Korean news and dramas into the north via balloons over the border or bottles by river.

South Korea’s unification ministry called North Korea’s plan to launch the anti-south propaganda “regrettable” and urged the country to call off the plan.