North Korea threatens ‘shower of shells’ in response to anti-Pyongyang leaflets

North Korea criticised rival South Korea on Wednesday for removing a law that banned private activists from sending anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets to the North.

North Korea insisted that such activities amount to psychological warfare and threatened to respond with a “shower of shells”.

The statement published by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) was the first time state media commented on the decision by South Korea’s constitutional court in September to invalidate a 2020 law that criminalised leafletting.

The decision was based on concerns that it excessively restricted free speech.

They included Park Sang-hak, who has been a frequent target of North Korean government anger for his years-long campaign of flying leaflets across the border with giant balloons.

North Korea is extremely sensitive about any outside attempt to undermine leadership of authoritarian ruler Kim Jong Un as he maintains tight control over the country’s 26 million people while severely restricting their access to foreign news.

The law, crafted by the previous liberal government in Seoul that pursued inter-Korean engagement, was passed six months after the North expressed its frustration over the leaflets by blowing up an inter-Korean liaison office in the North Korean border town of Kaesong in June 2020.

Tensions between the nations are at their highest point in years as the pace of both Mr Kim’s weapons tests and South Korea’s combined military exercises with the United States have intensified in a tit-for-tat cycle.

In comments attributed to a political commentator, the KCNA warned that the North in the current state of tensions would consider leafletting as a “high-level psychological warfare” and even a “pre-emptive attack conducted before a start of war”.

“Under the present situation where a spark may lead to explosion, there is no guarantee that such military conflicts as in Europe and the Middle East would not break out on the Korean Peninsula,” the KCNA said, apparently referring to Russia’s war on Ukraine and the violence in Israel and Gaza.

The agency claimed that future leafletting campaigns could trigger an unprecedented response from North Korea’s military, which stands ready to “pour a shower of shells” toward the sites where the leaflets are launched as well as the “bulwark of the region of (south) Korean puppets”.

While North Korea often makes bizarre threats that are not carried out, the comments reflected the animosity between the rival countries amid a prolonged freeze in diplomacy.