North and South Koreans returned to work yesterday at a jointly run factory park after a five-month shutdown triggered by rising animosity between the rivals, with some companies quickly resuming production and others getting their equipment ready.
South Korean business owners who have lost millions of dollars because of the hiatus say they will need several months to recover.
“I feel good about the park’s resumption, but I also have a heavy heart,” said Sung Hyun-sang, president of apparel manufacturer Mansun Corp, which has lost about 7 billion won (US$6.4 million) because of the shutdown at the Kaesong factory complex. “We’ve suffered too much damage.”
About 800 South Korean managers and tens of thousands of North Korean workers began returning yesterday to the factories at the Kaesong park, just north of the Demilitarized Zone.
The reopening is a sign that relations between the two Koreas are warming after a spring that saw threats of nuclear war from Pyongyang.
Among businessmen at Kaesong, many of whom operate small or mid-sized firms, there is a nagging worry about the future. The companies at Kaesong say they have lost a combined total of about 1 trillion won over the past five months and may need up to a year to get their businesses back on track.
About 1,000 of Mansun’s 1,350 North Korean employees returned to work and tested factory equipment. They were to start cutting fabric and doing sewing work by machine later in the day, said Lee Suk-ja, one of the firm’s four South Korean managers.
“They were pleased to see us again. It was like meeting them for the first time,” Lee said in a telephone interview from Kaesong. “Everyone here is extremely busy today.”
The park, established in 2004 during a period of warming ties between the Koreas, was considered a test case for reunification. It combined South Korean knowledge and technology with cheap North Korean labor. It was also the last major cross-border cooperation project before Pyongyang withdrew its 53,000 workers in early April to protest annual military drills between Seoul and Washington and alleged insults against the country’s leadership.
“We felt disconsolate [about the North Koreans’ pullout] at first, but we didn’t know that it would last this long,” said Yeo Dongkoo, director at Sudo Corp, which produces handkerchiefs and scarves at Kaesong.
By the end of last year, the more than 120 South Korean firms with operations at Kaesong had produced US$2 billion in goods during the previous eight years.
The South Korean government provided about 150 billion won in insurance payments to 46 of those companies because of the shutdown, but they were required to return the money because the park has resumed operations, Seoul’s Unification Ministry said.
Kaesong’s reopening comes as tensions on the peninsula gradually ease, with the North dialing down its war rhetoric and seeking to restart various cooperation projects with South Korea. The two Koreas plan to hold a reunion of families separated by the Korean War next week for the first time in three years.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
RSS