Why North Korea is sending its rubbish to the South
AS ANYONE WHO has feuded with a neighbour knows, dumping rubbish over the hedge is a serious escalation. So imagine South Korea’s anger at the North, which has sent some 2,000 balloons, each carrying around 10kg of detritus, across the border since May 28th. The most recent bouquet, numbering around 350, started arriving on June 24th. According to the South, the bags contained paper, old clothing and parasites that probably originated in human faeces. Why is North Korea sending its rubbish south?
According to Kim Yo Jong, the North’s chief propagandist and sister of Kim Jong Un, its dictator, it is responding to balloons sent northwards. She has warned that the “goblins of liberal democracy” in South Korea will receive many more balloons in return for those they send towards the North.
South Korea does indeed have a history of floating balloons across the border. Its government once used them to send propaganda—including pictures of scantily clad women encouraging North Koreans to defect—but stopped in the early 2000s. Activists then stepped into the breach, launching balloons carrying leaflets and USB sticks loaded with pop music. The North’s latest barrage started after balloons from the South delivered 300,000 flyers that criticised the northern regime’s reversal of a decades-old policy of pursuing peaceful unification.
Mr Kim fears that information from the outside world will influence his people, which is why balloons carrying both agitprop and K-pop so worry his regime. Although the results of the South’s balloon campaign are hard to discern, information warfare has been effective on the peninsula. Many of the balloon-launching activists in the South escaped from the North themselves, and lots of them say that encounters with South Korean culture helped convince them to defect. The members of BTS, South Korea’s most popular boy band, no doubt did more to project South Korean power by appearing on activists’ USB sticks than by serving in the armed forces.
That private citizens send these parcels does not matter to the Kims. In their view, the South Korean government’s failure to stop its citizens from sending propaganda bearing balloons is just as bad as ordering them to do it. And Ms Kim has reason to believe that expressing displeasure will work. When she complained about activists sending balloons in 2020, Moon Jae-in, then South Korea’s president and a believer in rapprochement, banned them. But attempts to crack down on activists did not stop the balloons, and the ban was deemed unconstitutional in 2023. A hawkish government is now in office; it insists it has no right to interfere with balloon launches.
These exchanges are risky. In 2014 the North shot at balloons with artillery. In 2017 the South did the same with machineguns. Some of the rubbish from the North’s most recent bunch landed not far from the office of Yoon Suk Yeol, the South’s president, in Seoul. He often promises to meet provocation with retaliation much graver than the initial blow. North Korea makes similar threats. Other events have put the two countries on guard. They include Mr Kim’s recent meeting with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and warning shots fired by soldiers from the South at North Korean soldiers doing construction work in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) separating the two countries.
But balloons are unlikely to start a war. Like the loudspeakers through which both sides blare propaganda across the DMZ—recently restarted by the South in response to the North’s rubbish storm—they come into play when relations are strained. When tensions ease, South Korea’s government tends to try to clamp down on them. The balloons are a weather vane for inter-Korean relations: they show which way the wind blows. ■