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| This captured image from the Korean Central News Agency website shows photos of President Moon Jae-in imprinted on anti-South Korea leaflets being covered with cigarette butts and dirt. Yonhap |
By Yi Whan-woo
North Korea reaffirmed its plan to launch anti-South Korea leaflets, Sunday, a day after the Ministry of Unification expressed regrets over the plan and urged the North to drop it immediately.
Tasked with propaganda operation, the North's United Front Department (UFD) holds the South responsible for "scrapping" a 2018 inter-Korean agreement that sought to end hostile activities at the border.
"We, clearly aware that leaflet scattering is a violation of the South-North agreement, do not have any intent to reconsider or change our plan at a time when South-North relations have already been broken down," a UFD spokesman said in a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). "The South Korean authorities must no longer talk about the agreement that has been already reduced to a dead document."
On Saturday, the unification ministry asked the North to withdraw a plan to send the leaflets across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), after Pyongyang's state-controlled media reported it.
Pyongyang came up with the plan as one of several retaliatory measures in response to anti-North Korea leaflets sent by a group of defectors using balloons last month.
The leaflets from the South, according to the North, had disparaging comments about its leader Kim Jong-un.
North Korean media showed images of a pile of leaflets with photos of President Moon Jae-in, littered with cigarette butts and dirt.
"Throughout the nation, preparation for the leaflet campaign is underway intensively. We will print the leaflets en masse and pour them over the head of the South Korean authorities," said the Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the ruling Workers' Party.
Regarding the South's move to legislate a ban against the leaflet campaign launched from its territory, the North said it is "too late" and that Seoul is "merely coming up with little more advanced excuses."
"Before belatedly touting violation and principle, they should have looked back on who perpetrated first and connived at acts that lit the fuse of the South-North conflict and who deteriorated the situation to catastrophe," the UFD spokesperson said. "When they are put in our shoes, the South Korean authorities will be able to understand even a bit how disgustedly we looked at them and how offending it was for us."
Among its retaliatory measures, the North vowed to restore guard posts at the DMZ that were removed under an inter-Korean agreement and redeploy military to the joint tourist complex on Mount Geumgang and the joint industrial park in Gaeseong.
A source familiar with Pyongyang said Sunday the North has been sending small groups of troops to border sentry posts for clearing foliage and road maintenance.
The source said up to five soldiers were seen with shovels and sickles at small stakeout boxes. It added the South does not see the move as a step to make good on Pyongyang's threat of military action.
