SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean civic groups that send anti-Pyongyang leaflets into North Korea are breaking the law and face prosecution if they enclose the communist state’s money, a South Korean spokesman said on Wednesday.
Activist groups in the South have launched the leaflets with messages printed in water-proof ink on plastic sheets critical of the North’s leadership, angering Pyongyang and causing it to lash out at the government in the South as encouraging the attacks.
Hundreds of thousands of leaflets have been sent across the heavily armed border, many with U.S. dollars or Chinese yuan. The groups have planned to use the North Korean currency soon.
The conservative government of President Lee Myung-bak, which has called on the North to return to dialogue, has said there is no legal basis to outlaw the leaflet drops themselves.
“It is against the law for civic groups to bring in North Korean currency without Unification Minister authorization and enclose it in leaflets,” ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon said at a news briefing.
“It is the related ministries’ position that such a request for authorization, if it comes, is likely to harm the order of South-North cooperation and thus will not be granted.”
Relations between the two Koreas -- still technically at war -- have chilled sharply since Lee took office early last year with a promise to end the free-flow of aid to the North unless it moved to end its nuclear weapons program.
North Korea, furious at Lee’s tough policies, has threatened to “wipe out” the South and restricted exchanges, cutting tourism and limiting the access of South Korean workers to a joint factory park just north of the border.
But South Korea has stuck to its argument that it was up to the prickly North to change its way if increasingly icy ties had any chance of warming, while the groups launching the leaflets showed no signs of backing off.
Reporting by Jack Kim; Editing by Sugita Katyal
