President Park Geun-hye of South Korea has more stones than Barack Obama. She isn't content to lead from behind when it comes to dealing with North Korea. Instead of groveling apologies, she called a bluff. Jack Kim of Reuters reports:
Impoverished North Korea said on Wednesday it was reopening the troubled Kaesong industrial zone jointly run with the wealthy South just minutes after Seoul signalled its willingness to let it close for good. The North's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, which handles Pyongyang's ties with Seoul, proposed talks aimed at normalising the project and said the safety of South Koreans visiting the factory park would be guaranteed.
The committee was "prompted by its desire to bring about a new phase of reconciliation, cooperation, peace, reunification and prosperity by normalizing operation in the Kaesong zone", it said in unusually conciliatory remarks.
The comments were carried by the North's official KCNA news agency about 90 minutes after South Korea announced steps to compensate its firms that operate factories in Kaesong for losses - a step widely seen as a move towards shutting down the rivals' last symbol of cooperation. (snip)
The decision to pay 109 South Korean small and medium-sized manufacturers from a government insurance fund came after the North went for 10 days without responding to what Seoul said was its "final offer" for talks aimed at reopening the project.
The North Koreans had far more to lose than Park. The 53,000 laborers working in factories belonging to 109 Korean companies are paid in hard currency, and the state keeps the lion's share of their take. There are precious few other sources of hard currency for the North, even counting sales of nuclear technology, drugs, and counterfeiting.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
