N. Korea will freeze South’s assets at joint industrial park
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Thursday that it will freeze all South Korean assets at a joint industrial complex the South shut down to retaliate for a recent nuclear test and a rocket launch by the North.
It also ordered all 248 South Korean managers in the factory park in the North Korean town of Kaesong expelled by 5 p.m. Thursday, allowing them to return home with only their personal belongings. The North said it would sever all communication across the border after the last of the South Koreans left.
In addition, it said it was shutting down the only cross-border highway open between the two Koreas. The road has linked South Korea with the factory park since 2004, when it began operations just over the western inter-Korean border. The zone will return to the control of the North Korean military, it said.
The blizzard of retaliatory actions from the North came a day after South Korea said it was closing the Kaesong park because it had served as a source of cash for the North to help finance its nuclear and long-range missile programs, both banned under various U.N. Security Council resolutions.
South Korea’s action was “a declaration of an end to the last lifeline of the North-South relations” and “driving the situation in the Korean Peninsula to the brink of a war,” said a statement from the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, a North Korean government agency in charge of relations with the South.
The Kaesong complex had been the last functioning project of inter-Korean cooperation dating from the “Sunshine Policy” era, from 1998 to 2008, when South Korea began a series of joint ventures with the North. The decision to close the park signaled an end to a South Korean belief in using economic cooperation to chip away at decades of political mistrust on the divided peninsula.