South Korea yesterday said that it was removing loudspeakers used to blare K-pop and news reports to North Korea, as the new administration in Seoul tries to ease tensions with its bellicose neighbor.
The nations, still technically at war, had already halted propaganda broadcasts along the demilitarized zone, Seoul’s military said in June after the election of South Korean President Lee Jae-myung.
It said in June that Pyongyang stopped transmitting bizarre, unsettling noises along the border that had become a major nuisance for South Korean residents, a day after South Korea’s loudspeakers fell silent.
Photo: AFP / South Korean Ministry of National Defense
“Starting today, the military has begun removing the loudspeakers,” South Korean Ministry of National Defense spokesman Lee Kyung-ho told reporters yesterday. “It is a practical measure aimed at helping ease tensions with the North, provided that such actions do not compromise the military’s state of readiness.”
All loudspeakers set up along the border are to be dismantled by the end of the week, he said.
He did not disclose the number to be removed, but a Yonhap news agency report — which the ministry declined to verify — said that it was about 20.
Handout photographs released by the ministry showed soldiers wearing body armor unloading sets of speakers as part of the process.
Lee Jae-myung ordered the military to stop the broadcasts in a bid to “restore trust.”
Relations between the two Koreas had been at one of their lowest points in years, with Seoul taking a hard line toward Pyongyang, which has drawn ever closer to Moscow in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The two Koreas last year were involved in a tit-for-tat propaganda war, as the North sent thousands of trash-filled balloons southward, saying they were retaliation for propaganda balloons launched by South Korean activists.
In response, then-South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol ordered turning on the border loudspeaker broadcasts. Shortly afterward, North Korea started transmitting strange sounds along the frontier, unsettling South Korean residents.
Lee has taken a different approach in dealing with North Korea since his election in June, including requesting civic groups to stop sending anti-North Korean propaganda leaflets.
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