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The communist country suspended a cross-border cargo train and halted a day-tour program to its ancient capital city of Kaesong, effective from Dec. 1, according to Seoul’s Unification Ministry.
The North has permitted only 880 South Korean managers and officials to stay at the joint industrial park just south of Kaesong city, about half the number Seoul says is necessary to keep their factories running.
About 1,700 South Koreans from 88 companies had been staying in the Seoul-funded complex, managing more than 36,000 North Korean workers making light industrial goods, such as clothes, shoes and watches. Up to 4,000 South Koreans were staying at the complex when it was burgeoning last year.
On Monday the North opened its border gates only six times, as it had promised, down from 19 times in the past, crippling the transport of materials for the Kaesong complex. It also halved the number of vehicles and people allowed to cross the border at any one time.
Some 300 South Koreans had been crossing the heavily fortified border every day for sightseeing tours to Kaesong since December last year, but the tour program was halted from Monday.
The North has also cut runs of a regular freight train service between South Korea and the Kaesong complex, once described as a "blood vessel" between the two Koreas.
The crackdown on border traffic was in line with an announcement by the North's military on Nov. 12 that it would "strictly restrict and cut off" border crossings, accusing South Korea's conservative President Lee Myung-bak of pursing confrontation.
In response, Lee's government expressed regrets at the North's border crackdown, saying it was violating the inter-Korean summit agreement reached in October last year, under which the two Koreas agreed to resolve disputes through dialogue.
"It is very regrettable that North Korea has imposed restrictions on border crossings," Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon told a press briefing. "The measure cannot be justified and should be immediately withdrawn," he said, calling on the North to accept Seoul's repeated calls for dialogue to resolve the disputes.
Kim and other officials voiced concern that the border restriction could jeopardize the Kaesong complex, where South Korean investment and technology have been combined with cheap labor from the North to produce goods for South Korean consumers.
Analysts in Seoul expect that the North will eventually shut down the four-year-old industrial complex, as the military said this week's actions were only a "first stage," and stressed that the military never made "empty talk."
Officials and analysts say Pyongyang's further moves could upset the reconciliation process that has been under way for the past decade.
"Inter-Korean relations for the last ten years were focused on economic interests, but the North is now considering the South's new government's policy as undermining its political interests," said Cho Myung-chul, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy in Seoul.
"The North is expected to intensify its crackdown on the Kaesong complex," said Cho, who taught economics at North Korea's Kim Il Sung University before his defection to the South in 1994.
Since taking office in February, President Lee has adopted a tougher policy against the North and suspended economic and food aid for the impoverished country, citing its nuclear weapons drive and human rights violations, in a stark departure from his liberal predecessors who had pushed for unconditional reconciliation with their communist neighbor.
On the back of Lee's hard-line stance, Seoul's conservative civic groups and defectors from the North have stepped up campaigns against Pyongyang's human rights abuses and communist leadership. They have sent propaganda leaflets into the North critical of its leader Kim Jong Il and his dictatorship, angering Pyongyang's ruling elite, which is loyal to Kim.
The North cited the leaflet campaign as the main reason for cutting off ties with the South, which forced the Seoul government to call for the civic groups to stop the campaign. But the plea was ignored by the groups, which include family members of people abducted by the North. They plan to float 100,000 flyers again on Tuesday together with 1,000 US$1 bills, saying that providing outside information to those in the North is their “responsibility.”
The government has no effective legal means to stop the civic activity, as a ban would go against the citizens' constitutional freedom. Therefore inter-Korean relations may remain deadlocked for the time being.
