North Korea Sending 'Leaflets of Punishment' to South

North Korea is gearing up to send "leaflets of punishment" over its southern border, denouncing North Korean defectors and South Korea, its state media said Saturday.

The latest propaganda retaliation for leaflets from the South comes as tensions rise between North and South Korea, The Guardian reported.

The North's Korean Central News Agency reported, "The enraged people across the country are actively pushing forward with the preparations for launching a large-scale distribution of leaflets to pour the leaflets of punishment upon those in South Korea who are bereft of even elementary morality."

"Every action should be met with proper reaction and only when one experiences it oneself, one can feel how offending it is," KCNA said.

The leaflets are piled as high as a mountain, said the state news agency, with Twitter posts showing piles stacked up.

Photos carried by the official Rodong Sinmun newspaper showed cigarette butts and ashes piled on printed fliers featuring the face of South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Agence France-Presse reported.

One of the leaflets shows Moon drinking a cup of unidentified beverage and reads: "[He has] eaten it all, including the North-South Korea agreement," the news agency reported.

North Korea has blamed North Korean defectors for launching leaflets across the border and threatened military action. On Tuesday, Pyongyang blew up an inter-Korean liaison office, apparently to show its displeasure against the defectors and South Korea for not stopping them launching leaflets.

The two Koreas, which are technically at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended without a peace treaty, have waged leaflet campaigns for decades, The Guardian noted, adding South Korea's military used to launch anti-North fliers across the demilitarized zone. That program ended in 2010.

Several defector-led groups have regularly sent back fliers, together with food, $1 bills, mini-radios, and USB sticks containing South Korean dramas and news, usually by balloon over the border or in bottles by river, The Guardian reported.

Earlier this month, the North announced it was suspending communication lines with the South, NBC News reported, a move analysts called the start of  an attempt to whip up a crisis and force concessions from the South.

The secretive communist nation also said it was pulling away from its relationship with the United States, claiming there had been no actual improvement in ties since the historic handshake between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in Singapore two years ago, NBC News reported.

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