South Korea’s Joint Chiefs Of Staff (JCS) have accused North Korean leader Kim Jong Un of sending balloons filled with rubbish and manure across the border in a protest against K-pop. According to a JCS official, more than 260 balloons were flown across the border since Tuesday, and they contained “various pieces of trash, such as plastic bottles, batteries, shoe parts and even manure.” North Korean defectors and South Korean activists regularly send balloons across the border that contain anti-Pyongyang leaflets, food, medicine, money, and USB sticks loaded with K-pop music videos and dramas.
Kim Jong Un warned South Korea on May 26 that he would send “mounds of wastepaper and filth” over them in retaliation, marking the largest number of North Korean balloons sent into the South. Nevertheless, no damages have been reported yet, and the military deployed personnel from chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear response teams, as well as bomb disposal units, to collect the objects for a detailed analysis.
The JCS said that North Korea’s act violated international law and seriously threatened the South Korean people’s safety, and “sternly warned North Korea to immediately stop its inhumane and vulgar act”. Photographs of collapsed balloons revealed rubbish strewn around them, with the word “excrement” written on a bag in one image. Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s sister, responded to the incident by claiming that the inflatables were “gifts of sincerity” for South Koreans who “cry for freedom of expression” and will send the South dozens of times the number she alleged they sent into the North.
In an effort to halt the spread and influence of South Korean films, dramas, and K-pop videos to his citizens through a secretive anti-K-pop campaign, Kim Jong Un described K-pop as a “vicious cancer” corrupting North Korean young people in 2021. A study from a Seoul-based human rights group later claimed that the North had executed at least seven people in the past 10 years for watching or distributing K-pop videos
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