North Korea has proposed a meeting on a key joint industrial park, a South Korean official said yesterday amid mounting tension on the divided peninsula over the North’s defiant rocket launch.
The complex in the North Korean border town of Kaesong is the last major joint project between the rival Koreas and a key source of currency for the impoverished communist regime.
South Korean Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon told reporters that the North proposed to meet with South Korean officials at the complex on Tuesday, but it is not clear exactly what the country wants to discuss.
Earlier yesterday, however, South Korea’s Dong-a Ilbo newspaper said that the North proposed the meeting to discuss a South Korean man who has been held in the complex since late last month for allegedly denouncing the North’s political system.
Kim said Seoul officials were reviewing the North’s proposal.
Seoul has repeatedly called on North Korea to grant access to the South Korean man, but the North has refused to do so, without providing any specific reason.
North Korea has also been holding two female US journalists since they allegedly crossed the border from China on March 17 while reporting on North Korean refugees. North Korea has said it would indict and try the journalists — Laura Ling and Euna Lee of former US vice president Al Gore’s Current TV media venture — for allegedly crossing the border illegally and engaging in “hostile acts.”
Tension on the Korean peninsula has heightened since the North conducted a long-range rocket test on April 5 despite repeated international warning. The North has claimed it sent up a satellite into space, but regional powers counter nothing made it into orbit and the country only tested its long-range missile technology.
Earlier this week, North Korea said it would restart its nuclear program and quit disarmament talks in protest of the UN Security Council’s condemnation of the rocket launch, which some say tested long-range missile technology.
Four US monitors of North’s nuclear program left the communist nation after the regime ordered them out. They declined to speak to reporters after their arrival in Beijing on Friday. The last remaining American on the monitoring team — an administrator — left yesterday, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.
The pullout of international inspectors will leave the global community with no onsite means to monitor North Korea’s nuclear facilities, which can yield weapons-grade plutonium if restarted.
Stoking tension further, South Korea has decided to join a US-led program aimed at halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction that mainly target so-called rogue states like North Korea. The North has warned that it will regard the South’s participation in the Proliferation Security Initiative as “a declaration of war.”
South Korea had planned to officially announce its participation in the program today, but decided to put it off following the North’s proposal, a South Korean Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity, citing department policy.
The official did not elaborate, but Yonhap news agency quoted unnamed Seoul officials as saying the delay was aimed at reviewing “factors like inter-Korean talks,” but that did not mean that South Korea would cancel its plan to join the program.
Ties between the two Koreas have been strained since a pro-US, conservative government took office in Seoul last year with a tougher policy on the North. Pyongyang responded by cutting ties, halting key joint projects and significantly restricting border traffic.
The Kaesong complex has been considered a promising example of inter-Korean cooperation and it marries Seoul’s technology and management expertise with Pyongyang’s cheap labor.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
Thailand has netted more than 1.3 million kilograms of highly destructive blackchin tilapia fish, the government said yesterday, as it battles to stamp out the invasive species. Shoals of blackchin tilapia, which can produce up to 500 young at a time, have been found in 19 provinces, damaging ecosystems in rivers, swamps and canals by preying on small fish, shrimp and snail larvae. As well as the ecological impact, the government is worried about the effect on the kingdom’s crucial fish-farming industry. Fishing authorities caught 1,332,000kg of blackchin tilapia from February to Wednesday last week, said Nattacha Boonchaiinsawat, vice president of a parliamentary
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
DEFIANT: Ukraine and the EU voiced concern that ICC member Mongolia might not execute an international warrant for Putin’s arrest over war crimes in Ukraine Russian President Vladimir Putin was yesterday visiting Mongolia with no sign that the host country would bow to calls to arrest him on an international warrant for alleged war crimes stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The trip is Putin’s first to a member country of the International Criminal Court (ICC) since it issued the warrant about 18 months ago. Ahead of his visit, Ukraine called on Mongolia to hand Putin over to the court in The Hague, and the EU expressed concern that Mongolia might not execute the warrant. A spokesperson for Putin last week said that the Kremlin