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(3rd LD) N. Korea suspends Kaesong tours, historic train link
By Shim Sun-ah
SEOUL, Nov. 24 (Yonhap) -- North Korea said on Monday it will suspend tours to Kaesong, halt cross-border rail services and halve the number of South Koreans in a joint industrial complex in the same North Korean city early next week in protest at Seoul's tough policy toward Pyongyang.
The North will also eject more South Korean personnel and vehicles from the joint Mount Geumgang resort and the Kaesong complex, according to a statement by the North's military carried by the country's official Korean Central News Agency.
All the retaliatory measures will be go into effect on Dec. 1, the statement said.
However, the measures excluded shutting down the Kaesong complex, a symbol of inter-Korean rapprochement and, for the impoverished communist country, a key source of foreign currency, according to a separate letter sent to the firms and unveiled by Seoul officials.
"The South Korean puppets are still hell-bent on the treacherous and anti-reunification confrontational racket," the statement said.
Eighty-eight small-sized South Korean garment and other labor-intensive plants were operating in Kaesong, located just north of the heavily armed border, as of the middle of this month. The businesses employ more than 36,000 North Korean and 1,200 South Korean workers.
Monday's announcement is the "first step to cope with the prevailing grave situation," the statement said.
Pyongyang had warned earlier this month that it would restrict overland passages across the inter-Korean border starting Dec. 1, without elaborating on the exact moves it would take. Pyongyang closed its Red Cross mission and direct phone links at the truce village of Panmunjom after the warning.
Inter-Korean relations have soured since the conservative South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took office in February. Lee has vowed that the expansion of inter-Korean projects will only follow North Korea's nuclear disarmament. The North has expelled all South Korean government officials from the resort and the industrial complex a month after the government's launch.
South Korea suspended tours to the resort mountain immediately after a North Korean soldier shot dead a South Korean housewife who was touring the resort in July. The joint tour program to Kaesong continued to run normally however, despite the tension. The total number of tourists to Kaesong broke the 100,000 mark in October, nearly 10 months after the program began.
The rail link across the western part of the demilitarized zone began its regular service last December for the first time in almost 50 years, but it recently has been running almost empty.
The North's statement said they would "strictly restricting or shut" border crossings by all South Koreans into the two joint areas for discussions on economic cooperation and impose "more strict order and discipline" for the passage and entry to those areas.
Stringent sanctions will follow any violators of the measures, it added.
"The prospect of the inter-Korean relations will entirely depend on the attitude of the south Korean authorities," the statement warned, stressing that the North Korean military never makes 'empty talk.'
Analysts say the North's plans to restrict cross-border traffic, if carried out, would practically cripple even civilian exchanges between the two Koreas, which had been unaffected by their tense political ties.
"North Korea came out with the suspension of Kaesong tour, a measure that might incur damage to itself, above all other measures," said Koh You-hwan, a North Korea expert at Seoul's Dongguk University. "This signals the North's willingness to cut all civilian exchanges, too," he said.
Pyongyang will watch and see South Korea's response in the coming days, maintaining pressure on Seoul to change its policy, he forecast.
In the two different letters sent to the South's private Kaesong Industrial District Management Committee and South Korean plants in Kaesong, North Korea also announced a plan to halve the number of South Korean workers there, according to Kim Ho-nyoun, spokesman for Seoul's Unification Ministry that handles cross-border affairs.
North Korea, however, decided to ensure industrial activities by the plants since it does not want them to be a scapegoat of Seoul's "reckless confrontational policy" and in consideration of financial difficulties of the mostly small-sized firms, the letters said.
The North said in the other letter to the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency that the first-ever inter-Korean joint office in Kaesong would be closed and the remaining six South Korean staffers there will be forced out.
The two Koreas opened the landmark joint office in October 2005 to smooth civilian economic cooperation projects but it has not operated normally since the North ejected 11 South Korean government officials there in March.
The North sent similar letters of notice to Hyundai Asan, operator of the Kaesong the Mount Geumgang tour programs, and two other South Korean firms engaged in joint ventures with the communist nation.
North Korea is especially upset at Seoul's reluctance to carry out a slew of cross-border economic projects that were agreed upon in the historic summits of 2000 and 2007. Those projects would require massive South Korean investment in the impoverished communist state.
North Korea has also protested the spreading of anti-Pyongyang leaflets by South Korean activist groups. South Korea's large-scale war exercises with the U.S. military and the South's participation as a sponsor of the U.N. resolution on North Korea human rights this year further agitated the relations.
The North's announcement came on the same day that the chiefs of the South's plants operating in Kaesong visited the North Korean city for talks with North Korean officials. The topics discussed and the identities of the North Koreans attending the meeting were not known.
The South Koreans were accompanied by heads and other senior members of the private Kaesong Management Committee and their industrial interest body.
The outcome of the meeting will be released after they return from the one-day trip, according to the Unification Ministry spokesman.
sshim@yna.co.kr
(END)
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