N.K. calls on Seoul to stop propaganda leaflets

North Korea on Saturday denounced South Korea’s recent proposal to hold high-level talks, saying that Seoul should first stop all anti-Pyongyang hostile activities, including floating propaganda leaflets into its territory, before making such a “deceptive” offer.

On Aug. 11, South Korea proposed high-level talks with Pyongyang for discussions on various pending issues including reunions of separated families. The North has so far ignored the offer, as it ramped up criticism about Seoul’s joint military exercises with the United States.

On Saturday, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency took an issue with an ongoing anti-Pyongyang leaflet campaign being waged by civic activists in the South, many of them defectors from the communist country. The KCNA said in a report that the propaganda campaign is “driving the present inter-Korean relations into a deeper mire of catastrophe.”

“We would like to reassure them that the door will automatically open for the dialogue between the North and the South if such actions of confrontation as leaflet-scattering operations stop,” the report said.

Activists in the South often float hundreds of one-dollar bills along with anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets via balloons across the border to lure ordinary North Koreans to pick them up and read.

Pyongyang has frequently threatened retaliation for the leaflet campaigns but no real action has ever taken place.

“We have already declared solemnly that the scattering of leaflets is the most undisguised practice of the psychological warfare,” the KCNA report said.

In February, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry issued a report on the North’s human rights records after a year-long probe, saying North Korean leaders are responsible for “widespread, systematic and gross” violations of human rights. It also said the International Criminal Court should handle North Korea’s “crimes against humanity.”

The group also welcomed the U.S. interest in co-sponsoring a draft resolution on North Korea currently being written by Japan and the European Union, and called on the U.S. to ensure the resolution condemns the North’s human rights violations “in the strongest possible terms.”

They also urged the text contain language urging the Security Council to consider new targeted sanctions against those who are most responsible for crimes against humanity, prioritize the commission’s call for immediate access to North Korea’s prison camps for human rights monitors and humanitarian groups, and endorse the creation of a field-based office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. (Yonhap)