The decision will need to be approved by a cabinet meeting set for Tuesday before it takes effect
South Korean military officers check unidentified objects believed to be North Korean trash from balloons that crossed the inter-Korea border, on a street in Seoul.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Seoul will fully suspend a 2018 tension-reducing military deal with nuclear-armed North Korea, the South’s National Security Council (nsc) said Monday, after Pyongyang sent hundreds of trash-filled balloons across the border.
Seoul partially suspended the agreement last year after the North put a spy satellite into orbit, but the NSC said it would tell the cabinet “to suspend the entire effect of the ‘September 19 Military Agreement’ until mutual trust between the two Koreas is restored.”
In the last week, Pyongyang has sent nearly a thousand balloons carrying garbage including cigarette butts and likely manure into the South, in what it says was retaliation for missives bearing anti-regime propaganda organized by activists in the South.
South Korea has called the latest provocation from its neighbor “irrational” and “low-class” but, unlike the spate of recent ballistic missile launches, the trash campaign does not violate UN sanctions on Kim Jong Un’s isolated government.
The North called off the balloon bombardment Sunday, saying it had been an effective countermeasure — but warning that more could come if needed.
The 2018 military deal, signed during a period of warmer ties between the two countries which remain technically at war, aims to reduce tensions on the peninsula and avoid an accidental escalation, especially along the heavily fortified border.
But after Seoul partially suspended the agreement in November last year to protest Pyongyang’s successful spy satellite launch, the North said it would no longer honor the deal at all.
As a result, Seoul’s NSC said the deal was “virtually null and void due to North Korea’s de facto declaration of abandonment,” anyway, but that abiding by the remainder of it was disadvantaging the South in terms of their ability to respond to threats like the balloons.
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