North Korea orders military takeover of inter-Korean factories

North Korea has chose to expel South Koreans working at Kaesong industrial complex and freeze their assets.

Aiming to punish North Korea for a rocket launch on Sunday, South Korea’s government said earlier this week it will shut down the Kaesong industrial complex.

Halting activity at the park, where 124 South Korean companies employed about 55,000 North Koreans, cuts the last significant vestige of North-South cooperation – a rare opportunity for Koreans divided by the 1950-53 war to interact on a daily basis.

The North’s moves significantly raised the stakes in a standoff that began with North Korea’s nuclear test last month, followed by a long-range rocket launch on Sunday that outsiders see as a banned test of ballistic missile technology. South Korea responded Thursday by beginning work to suspend operations at the factory park, one of its harshest possible punishment options.

The Yonhap news agency reported that South Korea had bolstered its military readiness and strength along the western portion of the border in the event of a North Korean “provocation”.

“The South Korean puppet group will experience what disastrous and painful consequences will be entailed by its action”, it said, calling the South Korean president, Park Geun-hye, “a traitor for all ages”.

“Now we can say that all strings between the Koreas have been cut and that there are no more buffers”, said Ko Yoo-Hwan, a professor of North Korean Studies at Dongguk University in Seoul.

South Korean businesses at the park urged the government to reconsider the shutdown.

The North has called the shutdown “a declaration of war” and has designated Kaesong as a military zone.

The two Koreas’ quasi-state committees on running the complex are expected to hold talks over the suspension of the factory zone, including the movement of equipment.

Lee, who runs the electrical gear installation firm, said a North Korean official expressed worry when he went to pay taxes last month, weeks after the fourth nuclear test.

The zone, where North Koreans worked in South Korean-owned factories, opened during a period of engagement and and was originally championed as a way to improve the North’s economy – with a long-range goal of minimizing the gap between the countries if they are eventually reunified.

Still, Pyongyang took precautions to ensure the workers it hand- picked for the complex had minimal contact with their South Korean managers that could be potentially subversive.

It was a “difficult decision made to show South Korea’s resolute will and cooperate with the U.N. Security Council and the global community”, Yun was quoted as telling Wang.

The average wage for North Korean workers at Kaesong was roughly 160 dollars a month, paid to a state management company.

Although there had been a rush to leave after the expulsion order came, Kang said the North Korean officials had been quite reasonable.

That urgency, combined with the fleeting and euphoric glimpses of what Korean unity might actually look like, also gives cross-border tensions – even if it’s just the closing of a mundane industrial park – a sense of being part of one long, pointless and utterly anachronistic tragedy.

After a historic inter-Korean summit meeting in 2000 in which the two sides agreed to promote reconciliation, the hard-line North Korean People’s Army grudgingly stepped aside as South Korean engineers removed barbed-wire fences, tank traps and minefields to build the highway across the border.