SEOUL: North Korea will launch cross border attacks if Seoul continues to send anti regime propaganda over the heavily fortified frontier, state media warned Sunday.
The North's military will begin firing on border areas where the South's activists and military launch balloons carrying anti government leaflets and DVDs, the Korean Central News Agency said.
"Our military in self defence will launch direct, targeted firing attacks towards the origins of such anti republic propaganda activities if the practice continues despite our repeated warnings," KCNA said. The North's military, in the message carried by KCNA, urged the South to stop the "psychological warfare at once."
Tensions are likely to remain high on the Korean peninsula with the start Monday of annual joint exercises between the US and South Korea, which run until March 10 and which Pyongyang claims will make war more likely.
Sunday's warning came days after a lawmaker claimed the South's Korea military was sending news of uprisings against repressive regimes in the Middle East and North Africa.
Private activists in the South have for years used helium balloons to smuggle US dollar notes, DVDs and leaflets denouncing the North's regime and leader Kim Jong Il into the hermit state.
Seoul has held back its own propaganda campaign after the North repeatedly expressed its anger and threatened to retaliate.
But the state programme was revived after cross border ties plunged following the North's artillery attack on a frontier island that killed four South Koreans, including two civilians.
Seoul officials said Pyongyang has recently tightened controls on information amid growing popular revolts against despots in the Arab World.
But experts say the Kim family is expected to retain its decades long iron grip on power, in the absence of Internet access or institutions around which any revolt could coalesce.
The South's Unification Minister Hyun In Taek said in a Yonhap interview last week he expects the North to take steps to stop the turmoil spilling over to its 24 million people.
"I think the core of the leadership knows of the situation and sees it. From that viewpoint, it will obviously make efforts to keep the regime from being negatively influenced," Hyun said.
Pyongyang tightly controls access to the Internet and attempts to block other sources of information about the outside world. But DVDs and mobile phones smuggled from China have been eroding barriers.
A survey by two US academics of some 1,600 refugees from the North found that roughly half of them had access to foreign news or entertainment a sharp rise from the 1990s.
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