North Korea has dark plot for South’s aid

North Korea this week said it would expel some South Koreans working at a joint factory park in the North Korean border city of Kaesong, end a highly symbolic daily train run to the park and cut tours from the South to the city of Kaesong. “The Kaesong Industrial Complex was designed to be a strategic tool to threaten the South when necessary, and now that is being put into action,” Jang Cheol-hyeon, who once worked in a communist party division charged with managing ties with the South, told Reuters in an interview on Friday. Jang defected to the South in 2004 and is now an analyst with a think tank affiliated with the South’s National Intelligence Service.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il wanted to limit engagement to economic cooperation, Jang said.

“Kim Jong-il designed a strategy called ‘the counterplot to the South’s Sunshine policy’ and called on us to implement it.”

Former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who met Kim Jong-il for the first inter-Korean summit in 2000, is credited with the so-called Sunshine Policy that tried to draw the reclusive state out of its shell be enticing it with incentives.

Ties between the two Koreas chilled this year after President Lee Myung-bak took office in February and ended the Sunshine Policy by saying aid would no longer be unconditional, but instead tied to progress the North makes in ending its nuclear arms programme. An angry North, which called Lee “a traitor to the nation,” has told the South to expel managers from the joint factory park near the North Korean border city of Kaesong where about 90 companies make goods using cheap North Korean labour.

Jang said the North is making these moves now to raise political pressure on Lee at home, trying to isolate Seoul in international talks to end North Korea’s nuclear program in exchange for aid and diplomatic incentives.

Jang advised Lee not to back down, because “it is the North, after all that will be worse off due to frayed ties.”

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