South Korea Proposes Talks With North on Factory Complex

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea on Thursday revived its proposal for talks with North Korea to discuss reopening a jointly operated industrial complex, three weeks after their last attempt to start a dialogue collapsed amid mutual recriminations.

The two Koreas have bickered over the fate of the Kaesong Industrial Zone, a factory park located in the North Korean border town of the same name, ever since the North pulled out all 53,000 of its workers from the complex in April, citing military tensions it blamed on joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises at the time.

The owners of 123 South Korean factories who had withdrawn from Kaesong after their North Korean workers deserted them have been eager to return there. Their hopes rose, then crashed after the two governments first agreed to hold senior-level talks in Seoul on June 12, but canceled them in a last-minute dispute over who should lead their delegations.

Since then, the two sides had made no overtures over the fate of the Kaesong complex, until now.

On Wednesday, some of the factory owners said they could no longer wait and demanded that the two Korean governments let them return to Kaesong so they could disassemble their manufacturing facilities and relocate them to South Korea or elsewhere in Asia.

That prompted the North to open a cross-border communications hot line on Wednesday and invite South Korean factory owners and engineers to return to Kaesong to do maintenance work on their equipment ahead of the possible reopening of the complex. Factory owners have warned that their facilities will begin deteriorating soon, as the rainy season has just started.

On Thursday, South Korea refused to let the factory owners travel across the border. Instead, it reiterated its proposal for official dialogue, insisting that the fate of the factory park should first be discussed between the two governments. It proposed to hold talks at the border on Saturday.

There was no immediate reaction from the North.

“We make this proposal, considering the difficulties faced by Kaesong factory owners and the severe damage expected to their factories with the onset of the monsoon season,” said Kim Hyung-suk, spokesman for the South’s Unification Ministry.

The Kaesong complex, where textile and other labor-intensive factories from South Korea had hired low-cost North Korean workers, had been the last and best-known symbol of inter-Korean economic cooperation until it was shuttered in April.