MOSCOW, October 24 (RIA Novosti) - South Korea's National Police Agency (NPA) said on Friday that they will block the scattering of propaganda leaflets in a park near the inter-Korean border should the event cause violence.
"Our basic stance is that there is no legal ground for us to block private groups from scattering leaflets," an NPA official was quoted as saying by Yonhap News Agency.
"But we plan to dispatch some police forces there to prevent any accidents from happening in the case of a clash," the official added.
The official also said that police have the authority to intervene if a response to the leaflets becomes violent and life-threatening, according to the news agency.
The NPA announcement is in response to the launch of some 40,000 to 50,000 leaflets by conservative activists from the South Korean park Imjingak scheduled for Saturday. Residents in Paju, the city where the leaflets will be distributed, are protesting the potentially dangerous event.
"Some groups may come here once to scatter leaflets, but their action has a lasting psychological, physical and economic impact on residents' lives," a representative of the Paju residents said in a press conference Thursday, as quoted by Yonhap News Agency.
"We will no longer tolerate their action, which threatens residents' right to live," the representative added.
The Yonhap News Agency also cited an opposition lawmaker as saying the South Korean Prime Minister's Office has funded groups behind the leaflet distribution with subsidies worth 200 million won ($189,038) over the past two years, assistance preventing President Park Geun-hye's goal of reunification.
North Korea's Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea made comments in a white paper declaring the anti-Pyongyang leaflets a grave breach of international law and a "declaration of war."
Activists in the South regularly try to distribute leaflets across the border with anti-Pyongyang messages in an attempt to mobilize the North Korean people to rise up against repression.
On October 10 the same activists distributed leaflets via large balloons which caused North Korea to fire machine gun rounds at the balloons with some rounds landing on South Korean territory.
