N. Korea to scrap Seoul pact
North Korea said on Thursday it was ripping up military agreements signed with the South in a step seen as a prelude to shutting down a joint factory park, just as Seoul staged anti-submarine drills in tense border waters.
Signs also emerged that China, the North’s main benefactor and ally, is reviewing ties with the isolated state, a week after international investigators accused Pyongyang of torpedoing a South Korean warship in March. The sinking killed 46 sailors and sharply raised tensions in economically significant East Asia. In the latest chapter of blistering rhetoric, North Korea accused the South of driving 10 years of developing ties into the ground and said it would scrap pacts between the two sides’ militaries guaranteeing the safety of cross-border exchanges. The move could push the North a step closer to severing a border link which provides access to a joint industrial complex in the North Korean city of Kaesong. “We will completely repeal the military guarantee measures that our Army is to enforce related to North-South cooperation exchange,” the North’s Army Chief of Staff said in a notice carried by Pyongyang’s official KCNA news agency. It could also mean the beginning of the end for the Kaesong industrial project, where more than 100 South Korean firms use cheap local labour and rent to make consumer goods and has been one of a few legitimate sources of income for the North, worth tens of millions of dollars a year.
Mounting antagonism between the two Koreas has unnerved investors, worried the bitter rivalry could spill over into conflict. The KCNA statement also said the North was cancelling agreements aimed at preventing confrontations in the waters off the peninsula’s west coast and cutting off naval hotlines.
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