Seoul removes propaganda loudspeakers to signal a shift in policy under President Lee’s administration.
South Korean authorities began removing loudspeakers blaring anti-North Korea broadcasts along the country’s border, Seoul’s Ministry of National Defence has said, as the new government of President Lee Jae-myung seeks to ease tensions with Pyongyang.
“Starting today, the military has begun removing the loudspeakers,” Lee Kyung-ho, spokesman of South Korea’s Defence Ministry, told reporters on Monday.
Shortly after he took office in June, Lee’s administration switched off propaganda broadcasts criticising the North Korean regime as it looks to revive stalled dialogue with its neighbour.
But North Korea recently rebuffed the overtures and said it had no interest in talking to South Korea.
The countries remain technically at war because the 1950-53 Korean war ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty, and relations have deteriorated in the last few years.
“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,” the ministry said in a statement on Monday.
All loudspeakers set up along the border will be dismantled by the end of the week, he added, but did not disclose the exact number that would be removed.
President Lee, recently elected after his predecessor was impeached over an abortive martial law declaration, had 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 towards Pyongyang, which has drawn ever closer to Moscow in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The previous government started the broadcasts last year in response to a barrage of trash-filled balloons flown southward by Pyongyang.
But Lee promised to improve relations with North Korea and reduce tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
Despite his diplomatic overtures, North Korea has rejected pursuing dialogue with its neighbour.
“If the ROK… expected that it could reverse all the results it had made with a few sentimental words, nothing is [a] more serious miscalculation…,” Kim Yo Jong, sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said last week, using the acronym for South Korea’s official name, Republic of Korea.
Lee has said that he would seek talks with North Korea without conditions, following a deep freeze under his predecessor.