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Stranded South Korean workers cleared to leave North
Mon Mar 16, 2009 1:33am EDT
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By Jack Kim
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea said it would allow hundreds of South Koreans stranded at an industrial park in the North to return home on Monday, but Pyongyang showed no signs of lifting a blockade on the joint project.
North Korea restricted access to the complex of 101 South Korean firms on Friday, just days after cutting off a military hotline usually used to process daily passage to Kaesong park which is just minutes north of the border.
The industrial zone is still functioning, but at a minimum level. North Korea has repeatedly blocked traffic crossing the border into the estate.
South Korea's Unification Ministry said a North Korean military official had served notice that 453 people would be allowed to return to the South from Kaesong.
"The people who were scheduled to return today will all be coming back," Unification Ministry deputy spokeswoman Lee Jong-joo told a briefing.
Those returning include 233 who were stranded since Friday and nearly 200 stuck since Saturday, she said. North Korea had so far not issued permission to more than 600 people from the South waiting to enter the zone, Lee said.
Pyongyang's decision to restrict access to the industrial zone follows months of angry rhetoric against the South and President Lee Myung-bak, who last year ended years of no-questions-asked aid to the impoverished North.
The North's anger intensified last week when South Korea and the United States started a series of military drills.
The complex of South Korean firms at Kaesong was opened in 2004 and employs 38,000 low-wage North Koreans. It churns out light-industrial goods such as pots, watches and apparel.
To close down the project by shutting down the border completely would mean cutting off one of the North's few sources of foreign currency and scare off potential investors, analysts said.
CONTRACTS JEOPARDISED
An expert on the North at Dongguk University, Kim Yong-hyun, was quoted as saying that the workers in Kaesong were "hostages" and that North Korea was using the project as collateral to serve its political purposes.
An apparel maker with a factory in Kaesong was quoted as saying by the Chosun Ilbo newspaper that one of its buyers had expressed serious concern about getting deliveries on time and that future contracts may be in jeopardy.
The border shut-down came as the North has escalated tensions on the Korean peninsula with its plan to launch a satellite, which U.S. and South Korean officials believe is a disguised test of its longest-range Taepodong-2 missile.
Regional powers have warned that such a move would be in violation of a Security Council resolution that was adopted in 2006 in response to an earlier missile test by the North. In the same year, the North tested a nuclear device. Continued...
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