S Korea urges North Korea not to send leaflets amid high tensions

South Korea on Monday requested North Korea to abandon a plan to launch propaganda flyers across the border after the North said it’s ready to float 12 million flyers in what would be the most extensive such psychological campaign against its southern rival.

Hostilities on the Korean Peninsula increased last week after North Korea destroyed an inter-Korean contact office on its territory in anger over South Korean civilian leafleting against it. North Korea said it would fly propaganda flyers and take other steps to cancel 2018 deals that were meant to reduce military tensions at the border.

Yoh Sangkey, a spokesman at Seoul’s Unification Ministry, said to reporters that North Korea must halt its plan to send anti-Seoul flyers that “are not helpful to South-North (Korea) relations at all.” Earlier Monday, North Korea said it had manufactured 12 million propaganda flyers to be floated toward South Korea aboard 3,000 balloons and other undefined delivery equipment.

The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said, “Our plan of distributing the flyers against the enemy is an outburst of the unquenchable anger of all the people and the whole society.” The time for retaliatory punishment is drawing near. Some observers say ongoing weather conditions aren’t helpful for North Korea to fly balloons into the South so it may use drones to deliver the leaflets. They say this could trigger conflicts between the Koreas because South Korea must respond to incoming drones to its territory.

A South Korean activist recently said he would also drop about a million flyers over the border around Thursday, the 70th anniversary of the start of the 1950-53 Korean War. South Korean officials have said they’ll ban civilian activists from launching balloons toward North Korea.

Experts say North Korea is likely focusing on the South Korean civilian leafleting to boost its internal unity and apply more pressures on Seoul and Washington amid stalled nuclear diplomacy.