North, South Korea agree Kaesong industrial zone reopening date

PanARMENIAN.Net - North and South Korea have agreed to re-start operations at the shuttered Kaesong industrial zone, Seoul says, according to BBC News.

The two sides set a date for a "trial" restart of 16 September after talks that went through the night, the South's Unification Ministry said.

Work at the complex stopped in April when the North withdrew its workers amid high political tension.

The zone, just inside North Korea, is home to 123 South Korean factories that employ more than 50,000 North Koreans.

It is the last functioning inter-Korean joint project and a key source of revenue for Pyongyang.

According to earlier reports by Yonhap, the two Koreas also agreed to "internationalize" the Kaesong industrial park in the North's border city of the same name by hosting foreign investors, a proposal broached by Seoul to make it more difficult for North Korea to take any action against the park.

Back in August, both sides fell short of agreeing when to reopen the zone that has been idle since early April. They said only that the reopening would depend on how soon more than 123 impacted South Korean companies complete maintenance checkups on their facilities there.

The Kaesong industrial complex combines South Korean know-how and capital with cheap North Korean labor, and was the centerpiece of cross-border cooperation projects hatched during a previous era of warming ties. Other joint projects between the two Koreas closed as relations soured over the past five years.

North Korea in April pulled its 53,000 workers out of the industrial park, and South Korea then ordered its managers to leave as well, against their wishes.

The park resulted in nearly $2 billion a year in cross-border trade before its shutdown.