South Korean activists release balloons carrying anti-North Korea leaflets at a park in the border town of Paju, north of Seoul, on Oct. 29. South Korean activists floated anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border with North Korea a week after the North threatened military action over a similar propaganda exercise. (Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images)

Some 50,000 leaflets that criticize North Korea’s harsh rule were sent over to the isolated, communist state on Monday by a South Korean civic group.

The group, the Public Association of Sending anti-North Korean Leaflets, said they sent seven balloons with the leaflets over from the parking lot of the Imjingak pavilion in Paju near the border, reported the Yonhap News Agency.

Local residents protested the move, saying that it could provoke North Korea into attacking Imjingak. One resident told the news agency that sending leaflets from the park “brings down the number of visitors.” The resident owns a shop for tourists.

But a group representative said, “No one prevents us from flying leaflets to North Korea. It’s a freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution.”

Last week, a group of North Korean defectors sent more than 120,000 leaflets to the country from the same area in Paju, South Korea.

Via state-run media, North Korea had said several weeks ago that it would attack the Paju border area in South Korea if leaflets were sent across the border. It threatened a “merciless military strike.”

Choi Woo Won, a professor with Pusan National University and one of the activists, told reporters that “we’re not scared by these threats, and will continue to send leaflets,” reported AFP.

In the leaflets, the activists urge North Koreans to rise up against leader Kim Jong Un’s regime and cited examples of successful ousters including those of dictators Moammar Gadhafi of Libya, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania.

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