The withdrawal of the 43 factory managers meant that the Kaesong Industrial Complex, in the North Korean border town of Kaesong, was emptied out except for seven South Koreans who will remain for a few days to sort out a dispute over unpaid wages.

When that is settled, South Korea is expected to turn off the electricity it supplies to the complex, which until now has been one of the most brightly lighted parts of North Korea, a country shrouded in darkness at night because of a severe lack of fuel.

South Korea had planned to withdraw all 50 of its citizens from Kaesong by 5 p.m. Monday, but a dispute over the payment of some wages and taxes owed North Korea delayed their departure. In the end, 43 factory managers were allowed to cross the border shortly after midnight, while five officials and two communications technicians from the South agreed to stay on to sort out the dispute.

North Korea pulled out all of its 53,000 workers from Kaesong on April 9 in a protest against joint military exercises by the United States and South Korea that it said raised the possibility of war. It also blocked South Korean managers and supply trucks from entering the complex.

But it was not until Friday, when the North rejected a proposal for dialogue, that the South announced a decision to pull all of its 175 managers and officials, who had stayed in Kaesong hoping that the complex would reopen. Of those, 125 crossed the border on Saturday, loading as many finished products as they could carry on the trunks, seats, roofs and hoods of their cars.

The emptying out of the Kaesong complex represents a new low in inter-Korean relations. South Korea cut off all other economic ties with North Korea in 2010, blaming it for the sinking of a warship and the deaths of 46 sailors. North Korea cut off all military and Red Cross hot lines with the South last month, removing all official ties between the Koreas except for the lines of communication between their civil aviation authorities.

The American-South Korean military drills ended Tuesday. But there was no sign that the two Koreas would end their dispute over the Kaesong complex anytime soon.

“Our offer for dialogue still stands,” Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae, South Korea’s point man on the North, said in a speech to government advisers on Tuesday. “But North Korea must abandon its trite behavior. If they act like this, who will invest in the North?”

Even if the Kaesong complex resumed operation, Mr. Ryoo said, it would take a lot of effort by the North to dispel the mistrust it sowed among South Korean and other potential investors by the way it forced the shuttering of the factory park.

Since it began operations in late 2004, the Kaesong industrial park, where South Korea ran factories with low-wage North Korean labor, had served as a symbol of Korean cooperation. But in recent years, as those ties deteriorated and the two Koreas shed other joint projects, the complex stood as the last vestige of the “sunshine policy” the South pursued from 1998 to 2008. That policy was built upon the idea that projects like the Kaesong complex would encourage North Korea to open up and engage more with the outside world.

But the complex, built in “a very carefully constrained environment” that essentially detached it from the rest of North Korea, “has not led to the kind of systematic openings and interactions” that the supporters of the project had hoped for, Kurt Campbell, a former American assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said during a conference organized by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul on Tuesday.

So far, the Kaesong complex is the biggest casualty in the standoff that developed after North Korea’s nuclear test in February.

North Korea indicated that it was placing military priorities over the $90 million in hard currency its Kaesong workers earned annually at the factory park.

On Saturday, the North said shutting the complex down for good would allow the North Korean military to redeploy more troops, artillery and tanks along the border just north of Seoul, the South Korean capital, “thus opening up the route of advancing to the South.” The building of the Kaesong complex pushed those North Korean troops away from the corridor between Kaesong and Seoul, which had served as the North Korean Army’s main invasion route at the outset of the Korean War in 1950.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/world/asia/remaining-south-korean-managers-leave-north-korean-plant.html?partner=rss&emc=rss