South Korea said 70 percent of the US dollars paid as wages and fees for the suspended Kaesong industrial project, run jointly with the North, had been diverted for Pyongyang’s weapons program and luxury goods for leader Kim Jong Un.
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In January the United States flew a B-52 bomber over South Korea shortly after the North conducted a test of what it said was a hydrogen bomb.
South Korean army soldiers pass by a TV screen showing the live broadcast of South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s speech, at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2016.
Moody’s said in a report on Saturday that the shutdown of an inter-Korean factory park in the DPRK’s border city of Kaesong raised geopolitical risks more or less, but it noted that those risks were not much different from past tensions and that the South Korean economy can afford it.
The addition of the national security interests implies the warning that China will not sit by and watch military actions by the US and South Korean alliance that go beyond the role of deterrence on the Korean peninsula.
During an interview with Reuters on February 12, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi added the new principle of demanding the guarantee of China’s legitimate national security interests to its previous approach to addressing the North Korean nuclear issue, which has consisted of using dialogue and negotiations to bring about the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
The United States on Wednesday flew four of its F-22 stealth fighter jets over South Korean airspace in what is widely interpreted as a demonstration of power and alliance, following Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile provocations and Seoul’s unusually strong words against its hostile neighbor.
“In the past, incentive was stressed as the most important means for denuclearising North Korea”.
“We must throw away the impotent feeling of relying on the global community’s sanctions… and mobilise all possible methods to solve the problem ourselves”, she said.
Seoul officials said North Korea was able to divert the Kaesong payments because the workers there were not paid directly.
The move comes as the US and South Korea discuss possibly deploying a missile defence system in the South.
The deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, is drawing oppositions not only from North Korea but also China and Russian Federation. “The detection range of THAAD includes Beijing and the entire capital region, which links it directly with China’s core interests”, said Jin Jingyi, a professor at Peking University.
Park’s comments are certain to anger North Korea as they were made as the country marks the birthday of late dictator Kim Jong Il, the father of Kim Jong Un.
The ministry did not detail how it arrived at that conclusion. North Korea’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland on Monday called the exercises an obvious declaration of war, hinting at the possibility of retaliation.
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Pyongyang responded a day later by shutting down the last symbol of inter-Korean economic cooperation, expelling all of South Korean workers from there and freezing assets in Kaesong, while cutting off major communication hotlines between the two sides.
