It looks like the Korean government is trying to take away an excuse for North Korea’s lack of progress in the denuclearization talks:

Anti-communist activists decided yesterday to suspend their campaign of sending propaganda leaflets into the North, which has been at the center of tensions between the two Koreas.

The announcement came after their meeting with Grand National Party leader Park Hee-tae.

“Chairman Park Hee-tae asked us to restrain from the activity, citing the North’s recent hard-line measures which Pyongyang says are in retaliation for the spread of the leaflets,” said Park Sang-hak, head of the Fighters for Free North Korea, a Seoul-based North Korean defectors’ group.

“We decided to stop the leaflet dissemination for a while and will watch to see whether the North changes its attitude,” Park said.

Park stressed the urgency of mending ties with North Korea, while acknowledging that spreading the leaflets was lawful.

A group of North Korean defectors here and family members of South Koreans kidnapped by the North have flown balloons into North Korea laden with leaflets denouncing the communist regime and calling for North Koreans to defect. [Korea Herald]

These leaflets probably have been a huge annoyance to North Korea, but at the same time they have been using the leaflets as an excuse to increase tensions between the two Koreas.  Suspending the leaflet drops by these activists will do nothing to ease tensions, but the ROK government is just going through the motions of showing that they are doing what they can to ease these tensions and make progress on the nuclear issue.

Some how I don’t think the activist leader Park Sang-hak is going to maintain this suspension for long because it is pretty clear North Korea has no intention of giving up its nuclear program and will probably have to send in their leftist thugs again to try and silence Park’s group.