SEOUL (AP) — South Korea on Sunday accepted North Korea’s proposal for talks on a troubled joint industrial complex, setting up the first official dialogue between the two countries in a year amid tensions over the North’s recent rocket launch.
Unification Ministry spokeswoman Lee Jong-joo said officials of the two Koreas would meet in the border town of Kaesong on Tuesday to discuss the factory complex. South Korea announced Saturday that the North had made the surprise call for a meeting.
The industrial zone on the northern side of the border is the last major joint project between the rival Koreas and a key source of foreign currency for the impoverished North’s communist regime.
Ties between the Koreas have been strained since conservative President Lee Myung-bak took office in Seoul last year with a tougher line on the North. North Korea responded by cutting off ties.
In recent months the North has restricted access to the industrial complex by tightening border controls, raising concerns among participating South Korean companies about the project’s viability.
The meeting comes amid rising tensions over the North’s rocket launch and its weekslong detention of a South Korean man in Kaesong accused of denouncing the North’s political system.
North Korea has expelled international monitors and vowed to quit six-nation disarmament talks and restart its nuclear program to protest the U.N. Security Council’s condemnation of the April 5 launch.
North Korea insists it sent a satellite into space, but regional powers say nothing reached orbit and the launch was actually a test of long-range missile technology.
“We will thoroughly ensure that the inter-Korean contact will be made in a way that secures the safety of people and contributes to the development of the Kaesong complex,” Ms. Lee said in an apparent reference to the detained South Korean.
North Korea also is holding two female American journalists who North Korea says crossed the border from China on March 17 while reporting on North Korean refugees. It has said it will try the journalists — Laura Ling and Euna Lee of former Vice President Al Gore’s Current TV media venture — on charges of entering the country illegally and engaging in “hostile acts.”
Sunday’s announcement came a day after North Korea’s military warned South Korea to stay out of a U.S.-led security initiative aimed at halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
An unidentified North Korean military spokesman said South Korea’s full participation in the Proliferation Security Initiative would be seen “as a declaration of undisguised confrontation and a declaration of a war” against North Korea.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry expressed regret Sunday over the North’s threats and said joining the program would not be a “declaration of confrontation or war.”
South Korea, which has been an observer, had planned to announce officially its full participation Sunday, but decided on a delay following the North’s proposal of a meeting, a Foreign Ministry official said Saturday on condition of anonymity, citing department policy.
More than 90 countries have joined the program, which began in 2003 to help deter trade in weapons of mass destruction and missiles by states including North Korea and Iran.
Countries participating in the initiative exchange intelligence and hold maritime drills to stop and search ships suspected of carrying nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, materials to make them or missiles to deliver them.
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