The trash that landed on the presidential office in central Seoul descended from a flock of hundreds of balloons sent from the North on Wednesday, South Korea’s semiofficial Yonhap News Agency reported, citing the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. The garbage was discovered on the grounds of the compound by the Presidential Security Service.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff said as many as 300 balloons were detected by 4 p.m. local time. Wednesday’s tally was “expected to rise as additional balloons are floating in midair,” Yonhap reported.
Wednesday’s dump was the 10th such delivery since the balloon launches began at the end of May, according to data assembled by the Beyond Parallel project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. Among the items deposited across South Korea, according to the project: animal and human feces, batteries, cigarette butts, toilet paper, and clothes.
The garbage on Wednesday landed mostly around Seoul, the data showed, the capital city home to more than 9.6 million people about 35 miles south of the border — though earlier waves have reached as far south as Jeonbuk, a province in South Korea’s southwest. The balloons appear to be rudimentary, unable to be steered or directed toward a specific location, making the hit on the presidential compound more a stroke of luck for Pyongyang than a targeted attack.
Still, the garbage falling on the presidential office was a “significant PR embarrassment for the South Korean government because it shows how vulnerable they are to ‘soft terrorism,’ which could escalate,” said Victor Cha, Korea chair at CSIS.
“Imagine if the balloons were filled with unidentified white powder rather than trash?” he wrote in an email to The Washington Post. Kim Jong-nam, the half brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, was assassinated with the nerve agent VX at an airport in Malaysia in 2017, police there said at the time.
Seoul has retaliated by blasting propaganda broadcasts toward the North. South Korean activists have taken it upon themselves to send balloons of their own ferrying anti-North Korea fliers and USB drives containing K-pop and K-dramas. Sending leaflets to the North was briefly outlawed in the South before the law was struck down last year.
The resumption of the broadcasts comes after Seoul stopped the audio warfare in 2015, when an angered North began a military buildup along the border.
North Korea and South Korea are still technically at war with each other, having never signed a peace treaty to end last century’s Korean War, though the weaponry being lobbed across the demilitarized zone is now garbage and K-pop. (Insurers in the South have begun covering damage inflicted to cars by the balloons despite cutouts in policies exempting acts of war, the Korea Times reported.)
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has taken a more assertive stance against Pyongyang, dashing some activists’ hopes of reunification, as South Korea aligns itself more closely with Japan and the United States to manage risks in the region such as a more zealous Beijing.
Cha, of CSIS, said the government in Seoul has “not looked for a conciliatory solution but has ramped up the escalation” with its broadcasts across the border.
Ultimately, however, the tit-for-tat reflects most poorly on Pyongyang, displaying its “vulnerability and insecurity,” Cha said. North Korea’s leaders are “more afraid of BTS than US-South Korean military exercises or U.S. nuclear weapons,” he said.
