President Park Geun Hye declared today that a North Korean guarantee foreswearing a repeat of the current Kaesong Industrial Complex shutdown marks a key element of not only re-opening the Complex, but also of future improvement to inter-Korean relations.
President Park, speaking with her staff at the Blue House in the lee of yesterday’s tentative inter-Korean agreement, said, “It is fortunate that an agreement has been reached so that our companies are able to remove finished goods and raw materials. This provides an opportunity for Kaesong Complex businessmen to limit their damage, and I hope you will make every endeavor to make sure that the removal of goods and checks on facilities go well.”
However, Park cautioned that ensuring that the same or similar does not happen again is not merely an issue pertaining to the Kaesong Complex; rather, it relates directly to the possibility of future good relations between North and South Korea.
“If we want South-North relations to proceed well going forward then we must make an agreement that meets common sense and international norms,” she said. “That agreement must then be unstintingly respected so that trust can build and improved relations can come about.”
The Park administration reportedly has in mind the internationalization of Kaesong as one way to avoid a repeat of the current three-month shutdown. If the Complex were internationalized, meaning that Chinese and other third-nation capital could enter, it is assumed that this would make it harder for North Korea to shut the Complex down unilaterally. However, it is unclear whether such international capital would wish to enter the at-risk manufacturing zone, or how existing insurance arrangements would operate under an internationalized structure.
