SEOUL, Oct 11 (Reuters) - South Korea said on Tuesday it will allow 120 of its firms to restart building a joint industrial park with North Korea, a fresh sign of tensions between the rival countries easing.
Construction of five factories can resume, and work to build seven new ones can go ahead, South Korea’s Unification Ministry said, 17 months after stopping activity in protest at what the South said was an attack by the North on one of its ships.
The South Korean firms employ about 46,000 North Korean workers at the Kaesong industrial park to make clothes, utensils and watches, taking advantage of cheaper labour and property than is available in the South.
South Korea accuses the North of a torpedo attack that sank one of its navy ships in March last year, killing 46 sailors. Pyongyang denies the charge.
President Lee Myung-bak cut off nearly all ties with the North after an international team of experts led by the South’s military concluded the North was responsible. Later in the year, tension on the Korean peninsula rose to its highest in decades after the North shelled a South Korean island.
More recently, Lee’s government has made contact with the North in tentative dialogue aimed at restarting stalled international talks on ending Pyongyang’s nuclear arms programme in return for economic aid and diplomatic recognition. In late September, his party chief visited Kaesong, just minutes from the heavily-guarded border.
Lee has been criticised for having little to show for his hardline policy, and his Grand National Party (GNP) faces an uphill battle to retain a majority in a parliamentary election next year.
The front runner to be the country’s next president, Park Geun-hye, has said Seoul must soften its unforgiving stance towards the North. Relations between the two will be a campaign issue among voters separated from family members since the war. (Reporting by Jack Kim; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)
