Koreas hold Kaesong committee meeting
Iran Press TV
Mon Sep 2, 2013 8:31AM GMT
North Korea and South Korea have held the first meeting of a joint committee to prepare the ground for reopening the jointly-run Kaesong industrial zone.
The ten-member committee stared the meeting in Kaesong at 10 am local time (0100 GMT) on Monday to focus on the timing for reopening the complex, which was shut down five months ago amid tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
“We will try our best to reinvent Kaesong as an internationally competitive industrial complex where our firms can operate with no worries and foreign businessmen would also like to come,” Kim Ki-woong, the head of the South’s delegation, said before leaving Seoul.
The two sides agreed to reopen the zone on August 14 following extensive talks.
The Kaesong Industrial Complex, where some 53,000 North Koreans worked, has been a rare symbol of cross-border cooperation between the two Koreas for the past few years.
The complex was established in 2004, but its operations were suspended in April 2013 amid tensions between Seoul and Pyongyang over the joint military exercises by the South and the United States.
Washington flew its B-2 nuclear bombers over the Korean Peninsula during the military drills. Pyongyang, in response, threatened to attack the US mainland with nuclear weapons and to enter a war with the South.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) recently said the escalating tension on the Korean Peninsula is attributable to the US ‘heinous hostile policy’ toward North Korea.
DB/HSN
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