SEOUL, South Korea –North Korea on Thursday seized South Korea’s machinery and manufactured goods at a jointly run industrial park on their border in a retort to the South’s decision to order all of its citizens home from the site.
Taken with a North Korean decision to switch off both of its high-level telephone hotlines to the South, the closure of their main business exchange reflects a rise in the bitterness between the two governments since a recent nuclear test and a long-range rocket test by Pyongyang.
First, South Korea announced it was withdrawing its staff in protest. Then North Korea’s KCNA news agency reported Pyongyang was putting the complex under military control and giving its South Korean staff until 5 p.m. Thursday to get out. Within hours, all of the South Korean staff at the Kaesong joint industrial complex in the communist North had left, Seoul said.
The Kaesong factory, only a few kilometers from the heavily militarized border, served as a window to the outside world for the reclusive North and earned scarce foreign exchange with the North for Pyongyang. Some 54,000 low-paid North Koreans work in more than 124 factories producing textiles, clothes, appliances and parts for machines, cars and semiconductors. Their wages were paid directly to the North’s government. Construction of the site began in 2004.
