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North Korea Pulls Workers at Plants It Runs With South

April 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The Kaesong industrial complex, in the North Korean border town of the same name, operated for eight years despite political and military tension, including the North Korean artillery attack on a South Korean island three years ago. North Korea’s decision to withdraw its workers, although it called the move temporary, presented the most serious challenge to its viability.

North Korea “will temporarily suspend the operations in the zone and examine the issue of whether it will allow its existence or close it,” the country’s official Korean Central News Agency quoted Kim Yang-gon, a secretary of the Central Committee of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, as saying after visiting Kaesong on Monday. The North’s final decision will depend on the Seoul government’s attitude, he said, making it clear that Pyongyang was using the future of the factory park to pressure Seoul for political concessions.

South Koreans had hoped that the North’s growing dependence on the complex as an important source of hard currency would provide Seoul with leverage on the North’s recalcitrant leadership and a possible buffer against military conflict. But the North’s decision on Monday indicated that Pyongyang was subordinating financial gains to political and military priorities in the crisis, analysts said.

Hours earlier, South Korea said it had no intention of talking with North Korea. Doing so amid a torrent of North Korean threats to attack Seoul and the United States with nuclear weapons would be tantamount to capitulation and would only embolden the North’s brinkmanship, officials here said. “If the Kaesong project is stopped and we have to pull our workers completely, it will be a tremendous setback to South-North relations,” Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae of South Korea said during a parliamentary hearing. “If we can bring about concrete results through dialogue, perhaps we will swallow our pride and start dialogue, but this is not such a time.”

“We don’t need photo-ops or talks for talk’s sake,” he said.

North Korea has blocked South Korean managers and cargo trucks from crossing the heavily armed border to Kaesong for six days to protest United Nations sanctions and joint military drills that the United States and South Korea are conducting on the Korean Peninsula. The blockade quickly dried up the fuel, food and raw materials for 123 South Korean factories there, forcing 20 of them to stop operating as of Monday, even before the North’s decision to pull out its workers.

More than 470 South Koreans remained in Kaesong on Monday, hoping that the North would lift the blockade. Long lines of South Korean trucks loaded with supplies for the Kaesong factories were stalled at the border on Monday, waiting in vain for the North to let them cross.

For nearly a decade, the complex, where South Korean factories hired North Korean workers and the North’s Communist authorities experienced the first taste of South Korean capitalism, has been held up as a test case for how reunification of the two Koreas might look. The factories, near the western edge of the border, produced $470 million worth of textiles and other labor-intensive products last year.

As relations deteriorated in recent years, however, the factory park has also become controversial in South Korea. Some conservative South Koreans argued that the complex, which generates $90 million a year in wages for the 53,000 North Koreans employed there, helped undermine the impact of United Nations sanctions by extending a lifeline to the North Korean regime, which the South blamed for the island attack and the 2010 sinking of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors.

North Korea’s threat this month to close the complex was met with skepticism from some news media analysts who indicated that the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, would not want to risk an important source of hard currency. North Korea was enraged, claiming on Monday that it “gets few economic benefits from the zone while the South side largely benefits from it.”

Mr. Kim “is not accountable to his people, and thereby can afford to raise tension almost indefinitely at a great cost to his own people,” said Lee Sung-yoon, a North Korea specialist at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts, recalling that the government did not change its policy even after a famine killed an estimated 10 percent of its population in the mid-1990s.

Jang Sung-min, a North Korea expert at the World and Northeast Asia Peace Forum in Seoul, noted that the decision to pull out North Korean workers was announced not by the hard-line military but by Kim Yang-gon, who is in charge of relations with Seoul.

“This is a shocking way of forcing South Korea to offer dialogue with the North,” Mr. Jang said. “I don’t think Kim Jong-un wanted to lose the project.”

South Korea “deeply regrets” the North Korean move, the Seoul government said in a statement.

“North Korea will be held responsible for all the consequences,” it said. “We will calmly but firmly handle North Korea’s indiscreet action, and we will do our best to secure the safety of our people and the protection of our property.”

North Korea has issued a daily barrage of bellicose language since early March, denouncing the United States and South Korea for the joint military drills and for spearheading the United Nations’ sanctions after a nuclear test in February, its third.

In the past week, North Korea appeared to move beyond just talk. It told foreign embassies in Pyongyang to consider evacuating their personnel because of rising tensions, and it moved one of its medium-range missiles to its east coast for a possible test launching, which South Korea said could happen as early as this week.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/world/asia/north-korea.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Possible Cyberattack in South Korea

March 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The attacks, which left many South Koreans unable to withdraw money from A.T.M.’s and news broadcasting crews staring at blank computer screens, came as the North’s official Korean Central News Agency quoted the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, as threatening to destroy government installations in the South, along with American bases in the Pacific.

Though American officials dismissed those threats, they also noted that the broadcasters hit by the virus had been cited by the North before as potential targets.

The Korea Communications Commission said Thursday that the disruption originated at an Internet provider address in China but that it was still not known who was responsible.

Many analysts in Seoul suspect that North Korean hackers honed their skills in China and were operating there. At a hacking conference here last year, Michael Sutton, the head of threat research at Zscaler, a security company, said a handful of hackers from China “were clearly very skilled, knowledgeable and were in touch with their counterparts and familiar with the scene in North Korea.”

But there has never been any evidence to back up some analysts’ speculation that they were collaborating with their Chinese counterparts. “I’ve never seen any real evidence that points to any exchanges between China and North Korea, ” said Adam Segal, a senior fellow who specializes in China and cyberconflict at the Council on Foreign Relations,

Wednesday’s attacks, which occurred as American and South Korean military forces were conducting major exercises, were not as sophisticated as some from China that have struck United States computers, and certainly less sophisticated than the American and Israeli cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But it was far more complex than a “denial of service” attack that simply overwhelms a computer system with a flood of data.

The malware is called “DarkSeoul” in the computer world and was first identified about a year ago. It is intended to evade some of South Korea’s most popular antivirus products and to render computers unusable. In Wednesday’s strikes, the attackers made no effort to disguise the malware, leading some to question whether it came from a state sponsor — which tend to be more stealthy — or whether officials or hackers in North Korea were sending a specific, clear message: that they can reach into Seoul’s economic heart without blowing up South Korean warships or shelling South Korean islands.

North Korea was accused of using both those techniques in attacks over the past three years.

The cyberattacks Wednesday come just days after North Korea blamed South Korea and the United States for attacks on some of its Web sites. The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said last week that North Korea “will never remain a passive onlooker to the enemies’ cyberattacks that have reached a very grave phase as part of their moves to stifle it.”

The South Korean government cautioned that it was still too early to point the finger for Wednesday’s problems at the North, which has been threatening “pre-emptive nuclear attacks” and other, unspecified actions against its southern neighbor for conducting the military exercises with the United States this month and for supporting new American-led United Nations sanctions against the North.

“We cannot rule out the possibility of North Korean involvement, but we don’t want to jump to a conclusion,” said Kim Min-seok, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry.

The military raised its alert against cyberattacks, he added, and the Korea Communications Commission asked government agencies and businesses to triple the number of monitors for possible hacking attacks. South Korea’s new president, Park Geun-hye, instructed a civilian-government task force to investigate the disruptions.

Nicole Perlroth contributed reporting from San Francisco, and David E. Sanger from Washington.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/world/asia/south-korea-computer-network-crashes.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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American Delegation Arrives in North Korea on Controversial Private Trip

January 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Mr. Richardson, who has visited North Korea several times, called his four-day trip a private humanitarian mission and said he would try to meet with Kenneth Bae, a 44-year-old South Korea-born American citizen who was arrested on charges of “hostile acts” against North Korea after entering the country as a tourist in early November.

“I heard from his son who lives in Washington State, who asked me to bring him back,” Mr. Richardson said in Beijing before boarding a plane bound for Pyongyang. “I doubt we can do it on this trip.”

In a one-sentence dispatch, the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency confirmed the American group’s arrival in Pyongyang, calling it “a Google delegation.”

Mr. Richardson said his delegation planned to meet with North Korean political, economic and military leaders and visit universities.

Mr. Schmidt and Google have kept quiet about why Mr. Schmidt joined the trip, which the State Department advised against, calling the visit unhelpful. Mr. Richardson said Monday that Mr. Schmidt was “interested in some of the economic issues there, the social media aspect,” but did not elaborate. Mr. Schmidt is a staunch proponent of Internet connectivity and openness.

Except for a tiny portion of its elite, North Korea’s population is blocked from the Internet. Under its new leader, Kim Jong-un, the country has emphasized science and technology but has also vowed to intensify its war against the infiltration of outside information in the isolated country, which it sees as a potential threat to its totalitarian grip on power.

Although it is engaged in a standoff with the United States over its nuclear weapons and missile programs and habitually criticizes American foreign policy as “imperial,” North Korea welcomes high-profile American visits to Pyongyang, billing them as signs of respect for its leadership. It runs a special museum for gifts that foreign dignitaries have brought for its leaders.

Washington has never established diplomatic ties with North Korea, and the two countries remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce.

But Mr. Richardson’s trip comes at a particularly delicate time for Washington. In the past weeks, it has been trying to muster international support to penalize North Korea for its launching last month of a long-range rocket, which the United States condemned as a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions banning the country from testing intercontinental ballistic missile technology.

North Korea has often required visits by high-profile Americans, including former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, before releasing American citizens held there on criminal charges. Mr. Richardson, who is also a former ambassador to the United Nations, traveled to Pyongyang in 1996 to negotiate the release of Evan Hunziker, who was held for three months on charges of spying after swimming across the river border between China and North Korea.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/world/asia/bill-richardson-and-eric-schmidt-of-google-visit-north-korea.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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North Korea to Auction Resort Owned by South

August 22, 2011 by Leave a Comment

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Monday gave South Korean tourism officials 72 hours to leave a mountain resort, declaring that it will start auctioning off South Korean-owned hotels, restaurants and other remnants of what used to be a symbol of inter-Korean cooperation.

When the resort complex opened in 1998 on the coastline foothills of Geumgangsan, or Mount Diamond, a scenic spot on the southeastern corner of the reclusive North, it helped usher in a period of détente between the two Koreas that would last a decade. The collaboration was halted in July 2008 after the shooting death of a South Korean tourist that aggravated what was by then rapidly chilling relations between the two sides.

North Korea gave the ultimatum on Monday after talks failed to resolve a dispute over whether tourism in the resort should resume, and under what conditions.

“We consider that the South has completely given up all rights on properties owned by South Korean companies and now start legal disposal of them, ” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency quoted the North Korean tourism authorities as saying. “All assets owned by South Korean companies in the Geumgangsan resort are banned from being taken out as of Aug. 21.”

The South Korean assets held in the resort amount to 480 billion won, or $443 million, according to government data. North Korea said last year that it had confiscated them, including a spa, a duty free shop and other businesses built and owned by the South Korean government.

Fourteen South Koreans were staying in the area maintaining the facilities owned by Hyundai and other South Korean private investors. The Unification Ministry, a South Korean government agency in charge of inter-Korean relations, said that it would take “all possible diplomatic and legal measures to protect the property rights of our government and enterprises.”

Hyundai-Asan, which developed and ran the resort, warned that anyone who buys facilities at the North Korean resort will be implicated in international lawsuits.

After attracting 2 million South Korean tourists by sea or through a road built across the nations’ heavily armed border, the project came to an abrupt halt in 2008 after a female South Korean tourist strayed outside the tourism zone one morning and was shot and killed by North Korean soldiers.

The killing quickly became a test of will between the two governments. President Lee Myung-bak had just come to office in Seoul, determined to get tough on North Korea, which he accused of returning generous South Korean aid with nuclear weapons development and military provocations. North Korea called him a “national traitor” and accused him of abusing the shooting to derail his predecessors’ reconciliation with the North and please his conservative power base.

Seoul said it would not reopen the tourism project at least until North Korea apologized and agreed to a joint investigation of the shooting. 

Pyongyang retorted that it would find a new foreign partner for the project. It has recently threatened to dispose of the South Korean assets unless South Korean investors of the resort  join its international tour program or lease or sell their assets.

Mr. Lee’s two predecessors, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, cited the resort complex as a symbol of their efforts to ease military tensions and build political trust through economic exchanges. 

But to South Korean conservatives, the project was an eyesore; after pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars for selling the tourism right to Hyundai, the North Korean regime collected additional millions of dollars  a year in tourist cash, a hard currency that they accused the leader Kim Jong-il of using to finance his nuclear weapons program rather than to feed his hungry people.

A Korean-American businessman has recently claimed that he might become a new partner for the North Korean government at the resort.

While Geumgangsan is only a short ride from the border with South Korea, it would be logistically difficult and politically risky for the Pyongyang regime to bus large numbers of foreign tourists from Pyongyang across the length of the poverty-stricken country where the people are kept isolated from the outside world, analysts say. Roads in North Korea also remain decrepit.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/world/asia/23korea.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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