North Korea yesterday reopened its border to South Koreans bound for a showpiece industrial estate in the secretive nation, ending a sporadic blockade that threatened to shut down factories there.
The North gave no explanation for its change of heart, which comes amid continuing high tensions between the two governments.
Elsewhere along the heavily fortified frontier, activists yesterday floated more anti-Pyongyang leaflets into the North — defying warnings from Seoul that their campaign would further inflame the situation.
PHOTO: AFP
The communist state has for months been angry at a tougher stance on relations taken by Seoul’s conservative government. It has blasted an ongoing US-South Korean military exercise, calling it a prelude to invasion.
SATELLITE
The North has also scheduled what it calls a satellite launch for April 4 to April 8. Washington and Seoul say its real purpose is to test a ballistic missile that could reach Alaska.
On March 9, the first day of the joint exercise, the North switched off military phone and fax lines that were used to authorize border crossings, before relenting the following day.
Last Friday it again shut the border without explanation, raising fears that many South Korean plants at the Kaesong estate would soon have to close for lack of raw materials.
Seoul officials said the North’s military sent a letter yesterday authorizing the resumption of trips both ways across the western and eastern crossings. Again, there was no explanation.
Kaesong estate opened in 2005 as a symbol of reconciliation on the divided peninsula, but its operations have several times been hampered by political tensions.
About 39,000 North Koreans work for 98 South Korean firms, producing items such as watches, clothes, shoes and kitchenware. Raw materials are trucked northwards and finished products travel the other way.
Koh Yu-hwan, a professor at Seoul’s Dongguk University, said the saga may indicate a lack of communications between the North’s military and its economy-related agencies.
“In order to protest the US-South Korean military exercise, the North’s military may have cut off border communications lines without thinking enough about the impact the move would have on economic and other sectors,” he said.
The estate earns the impoverished North some 30 million dollars a year in wages for workers, which are paid directly to official bodies.
At the Imjingak border area not far from the crossing, rights activists launched 10 giant balloons carrying a total of 100,000 leaflets denouncing the North’s regime and its leader, Kim Jong-il
“Down with Kim Jong-Il dictatorship!” a message on one balloon read.
The activists have started attaching North Korean banknotes to the flyers to encourage Northerners to pick them up, despite the risk of punishment.
The Seoul government has urged them to halt the launches, on the grounds they could inflame relations, but says it has no laws to ban them.
However, the activists have been investigated for a possible legal breach by attaching North Korean won. Seoul says unauthorized use of the currency in the South is punishable by up to three years in jail or heavy fines.
CHINA VISIT
Kim arrived in Beijing yesterday as the North prepared for the widely criticized satellite launch. Washington and Seoul say the launch is to test a long-range missile in defiance of a UN resolution passed after the North’s missile and nuclear tests in 2006.
China, one of Pyongyang’s few major allies and its largest trade partner, has not publicly stated its position on the launch.
Beijing also hosts six-nation talks on dismantling North Korea’s nuclear programs, which have been stalled since last December.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema