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 riposte to the South’s decision to order all its citizens home from the site.
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Pyongyang expels South’s workers after Seoul shut down operations at Kaesong zone to punish North for weapons tests.
Pyongyang ordered a military takeover of the Kaesong zone on Thursday, freezing South Korean assets and pulling out tens of thousands of North Korean employees.
The North’s aggressive measures marked a significant escalation of cross-border tensions that have been elevated since North Korea carried out a nuclear test last month and a long-range rocket launch on Sunday. “It’s hard”, said Yoon Sang-Eun, a driver, heading to South Korea.
Within hours, all the South Korean staff at the Kaesong joint industrial complex, which lies in the communist North, had left, the government in Seoul said.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the United States’ firm ally South Korea in 2014, it seemed to be the beginning of a promising courtship.
For her part, Ms Park hoped that her new friend in Beijing – South Korea’s top economic partner – would tamp down the relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons by the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un.
North Korea called the South’s shutdown a “dangerous declaration of war” and a “declaration of an end to the last lifeline of the North-South relations”. South Korean companies operating in the complex are expected to bring back equipment and materials in phases. She has shown a willingness to take quick action when provoked by the North. When North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test last month, for instance, she resumed anti-Pyongyang propaganda from loudspeakers along the border, despite what Seoul says was an exchange of cross-border artillery fire the last time she used the speakers. “It exemplifies… the brutality of the political climate in North Korea”.
The South Korean military on Thursday retrieved three pieces of what it believes to have been the rocket’s combustion gas jet nozzle from the ocean floor off an island located about midway along the west coast of South Korea, the country’s Yonhap news agency reported.
The Unification Ministry said in a statement that the government had “decided to completely shut down” the park.
South Korean businesses at the park urged the government to reconsider the shutdown.
In a statement, the association of South Korean companies in Kaesong denounced the government’s decision as “entirely incomprehensible and unjust”.
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The park also allowed people from both Koreas to interact with each other and glimpse into lives on the other side of the border. Some South Korean snacks have become popular among North Korean workers.
