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A banner calling for the end of propaganda leaflet distribution on Unification Bridge in Paju, Gyeonggi Province. (Yonhap News)

Over the weekend, South and North Korea continued their war of words over the dissemination of propaganda leaflets, with the North vowing to send its own propaganda leaflets into the South.

“The retaliatory campaign for scattering leaflets towards the South which is being planned as wished by all the Koreans will neither be bound to any agreement and principle nor be put into any consideration,” the spokesperson for the United Front Department of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) said in a statement on June 21.

While admitting that “leaflet scattering is the violation of the North-South agreement,” North Korea said that it does “not have any intent to reconsider or change our plan at a time when the North-South relations have already been broken down.” The North justified this action on the grounds that the South Korean authorities had turned a blind eye to defector groups launching balloons filled with anti-North propaganda leaflets.

North Korea responded to the South’s request to halt leaflet dissemination with savage criticism, characterizing the South Koreans as “top-class brazenfaced guys.” This statement was run by not only the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), which is intended for a foreign audience, but also by the WPK’s state-run newspaper the Rodong Sinmun, which is for domestic consumption.

On the morning of June 20, South Korea’s Ministry of Unification (MOU) expressed its strong disapproval of North Korea’s preparations for the large-scale scattering of propaganda leaflets and asked the North to immediately halt those preparations. The distribution of propaganda leaflets, the MOU said, is a “manifest violation of the inter-Korean agreement” and “doesn’t correct wrong inter-Korean practices but only makes them worse.”

The MOU was responding to images of printed propaganda leaflets that ran in the Rodong Sinmun that same morning alongside an article that said, “Our people’s holy retaliatory struggle [. . .] has turned into the one for distributing leaflets to the South in denunciation of the heinous perpetrators.”

The argument expressed in the June 21 statement by the United Front Department’s spokesperson is that, because of the South Korean government’s failure to keep its promise to halt the launch of the propaganda leaflets (which it had made in several agreements, including the Apr. 27 Panmunjom Declaration), trust has been broken and the time has come for the South Korean government to get a taste of its own medicine.

“Before belatedly touting violation and principle, [the South Koreans] should have looked back on who perpetrated first and connived at acts that [lit] the fuse of the North-South conflict and who deteriorated the situation to [this] catastrophe,” North Korea said in its statement.

By Noh Ji-won, staff reporter

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