Defectors get back at North Korea with K-pop balloons

A group of North Korean defectors in Seoul tried to fly giant balloons carrying K-pop and other South Korean popular culture content across the border, with a few appearing to have entered North Korean skies early Thursday, according to the South’s military authorities.

The defector group, which calls itself Fighters for Free North Korea, said in a statement on this day they flew the balloons in a tit-for-tat response following the hundreds of North Korean balloons filled with trash and propaganda that had been dropped in South Korea in the past week.

The group said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “insulted our people by spraying trash balloons all over South Korea, including Seoul.”

“While the Kim regime dumped trash on us, we are sending them culture and the truth,” they said.

They added that they filled the balloons with removable drives containing videos and audios of South Korean popular culture content, anti-Kim regime leaflets and US dollar bills.

“Kim, as barbaric as he is, still has yet to apologize,” they said. “Unless he apologizes, we will continue to send these balloons over to North Korea.”

In an address delivered at the Memorial Day ceremony on Thursday, President Yoon Suk Yeol alluded to the North Korean trash balloons as “a despicable provocation that would make any normal country ashamed of itself.”

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said that as of Thursday morning, at least a few of the balloons had made their way over to North Korea and that the military was watching closely for a possible response from Pyongyang.

According to the JCS’ latest count, about 1,000 of North Korea’s trash balloons entered the South in the past week.

After South Korea’s National Security Council warned of resuming anti-Kim broadcasts with loudspeakers installed along the border Sunday, North Korea backed down and said it would cease the balloon launches.

Following the balloon launches on Tuesday, South Korea voted in a Cabinet meeting to completely suspend the September 19 Inter-Korean Military Agreement, making the pact -- reached on September 19, 2018, to minimize front-line tensions -- lose effect entirely for the time being.

South Korea had earlier halted bits of the pact that would allow the country resume surveillance activities near the border after North Korea sent its first spy satellite to space last November.