It’s not quite an “open for business” sign, but the latest offer from Pyongyang shows that the DPRK needs hard cash more than a rhetorical victory. After booting South Korean business owners and managers in a months-long temper tantrum, cooler heads — and emptier pockets — in Pyongyang have prevailed:
South Korean business owners and managers will be permitted to re-enter a jointly-run border industrial complex for talks, North Korea said Tuesday, in an initial sign that Pyongyang wants to restore badly damaged ties with its neighbor.
The Kaesong Industrial Complex, the lone remaining symbol of inter-Korean cooperation, has been dormant since early April, when North Korea banned South Koreans from the siteand pulled out its own 53,000 workers. But the North said Tuesday it would consider “any discussion on the normalization” of the facility if South Korean business owners and managers pay a visit.
In other words, we need the money. Seoul wants government-to-government talks first, however, and aren’t likely to allow re-entry without them:
South Korea has made at least three separate proposals for government talks, most recently on May 14, when its Ministry of Unification suggested discussions at the border “truce village” of Panmunjom.
“If North Korea genuinely cares about improving inter-Korean relations, it should participate in government-level talks instead of contacting private companies or organizations,” a unification ministry spokeswoman said Tuesday. …
“North Korea has to pay a price” for recent provocations and the Kaesong closure, South Korean President Park Geun-hye said earlier this month during her visit to the United States. “Companies had believed in the agreement that was made and actually went to invest in the Kaesong industrial complex, but [the North] suddenly completely dismissed and disregarded this agreement overnight.”
That poses a good question. Why would business owners want to go back at all after having lost their investment, or at least seen it put to great risk, by the capriciousness and immaturity of the Kim regime? They might see a reopening as a means to recoup that investment, but if Pyongyang can bring their production capacity to a standstill on a whim, those businesses might be better served by creating production capacity in the South instead of restocking Kaesong.
Seoul won’t be in any hurry to reopen it either, or shouldn’t. The idea of Kaesong was to get the North to gradually convert to capitalism, in order to make peaceful reunification more likely and less traumatic. Instead, the North simply has used Kaesong as an ATM for hard currency and hasn’t learned any lessons from it at all. Why give Pyongyang the capacity for seizing hostages all over again?
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