July 14, 2024:
North Korean soldiers have recently been reinforcing their side of the four kilometer wide DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) with additional anti-tank fortifications, walls and roads. In early June police in North Hamgyong Province spent two weeks of bunker drills, training to reach bunkers built to protect police in case of an attack. At the same time many police informers quit their jobs because they were no longer being paid.
At the end of 2023 North Korea laid landmines on its side of the DMZ and reinstated arming border guards. All this unusual activity began on June 9th when about twenty North Korean soldiers crossed the demarcation line on their side of the DMZ and showed up near the South Korean side of the DMZ. South Korean soldiers fired warning shots and the North Korean soldiers, who may have gotten lost in all the mid-summer undergrowth, quickly turned around and returned to North Korean territory.
On June 4th South Korea formally suspended its military deconfliction agreement with North Korea, citing the dozen or more North Korea ballistic missile tests so far this year as well as the North’s new balloon harassment campaign. The deconfliction agreement was signed in 2018 and prohibited both countries from flying aircraft near the DMZ or conducting artillery exercises there.
The North Korean trash balloon operations began in late May as North Korea launched over 1,200 balloons carrying trash towards South Korea when the winds were blowing south. This is apparently in response to the South Korean campaign by South Korean civilians, many of them North Koreans who defected to the south, sending balloons carrying medical supplies, candy and other useful items north. It is considered illegal for North Koreans to collect and use the valuable, to North Koreas, contents of these balloons. Civilians know this and hide these valuable items and hide them from police searches. In the south, one of the North Korean trash balloons landed 50 kilometers south of Seoul, the southern capital and largest city. This balloon landed near an elementary school close to the Osan Air Base.
On June 4th South Korea announced that it held North Korea responsible for these recent violations, suspended its activities near the border and that South Korea would cease all its activities along the southern side of the DMZ until mutual trust with North Korea is restored. This makes the northerners look like ignorant and unreliable buffoons. This is not the image of itself North Korea is trying to cultivate and makes the South Koreans wonder who is who is trying to do what in North Korea?