Main opposition calls for resumption of psychological warfare against North

The main opposition United Future Party urged the government on Monday to employ psychological warfare against North Korea if there are further provocations.

“A certain way of stopping North Korea’s provocations is to make them feel that they have more to lose than gain from provocations,” the party’s in-house foreign policy and security group said in a statement.

Among other actions, the government should resume propaganda loudspeaker broadcasts at the border as it is a means of “psychological warfare that hurts Pyongyang the most,” according to Rep. Shin Won-sik, a member of the group who formerly served as the vice chair of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Loudspeakers that blared anti-Pyongyang broadcasts and K-pop songs from the South’s side of the border with the North were removed in May 2018, immediately after President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un held their first summit and vowed to end hostilities and work on denuclearizing the peninsula.

Later in the day, military authorities here said North Korea has started to install loudspeakers back again “in multiple places” inside the Demilitarized Zone.

The United Future Party planned to submit a resolution that condemns the North’s provocations and calls for demolition of its nuclear arsenals on Monday.

The party’s interim leader Kim Chong-in demanded an apology from President Moon over the “completely failed” policy toward Pyongyang as proven by the North’s recent demolishment of an inter-Korean liaison office in its city of Kaesong.

“North Korea knows that no matter what it does now, South Korea cannot take decisive measures, Inter-Korean relations should return to the level of common sense,” Kim said.

According to North Korea’s state media on Monday, the regime plans to send some 12 million propaganda leaflets to South Korea in a countermeasure against South Korea’s failure to prohibit activists and North Korean defectors from floating anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border. The two Koreas banned such activities under a 2018 inter-Korean agreement.



By Park Han-na (hnpark@heraldcorp.com)