SOUTH KOREA AGREES TO A CALL FOR TALKS FROM NORTH KOREA

By the Assotiative press

Published: April 19, 2009 - New York Times

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea on Sunday accepted North Korea’s proposal for talks on a troubled joint industrial complex, setting up the first official dialogue between the countries in a year amid tensions over the North’s recent rocket launching.

A Unification Ministry spokeswoman said officials of the two nations would meet Tuesday in the border town of Kaesong to discuss the factory complex. South Korea said Saturday that the North had made the surprise call for a meeting.

The industrial zone on the northern side of the border is the last major joint project between the nations and an important source of foreign currency for the impoverished North’s regime.

Ties have been strained since President Lee Myung-bak, a conservative with a tougher approach to the North than his predecessor, took office in Seoul last year. North Korea responded by cutting off ties.

The North has restricted access to the industrial complex by tightening border controls, raising concerns among participating South Korean companies about the project’s viability.

The meeting comes amid rising tensions over the North’s rocket launching and its weeks-long detention of a South Korean man in Kaesong accused of denouncing the North’s political system.

North Korea has expelled international monitors and vowed to quit six-nation disarmament talks and restart its nuclear program to protest the United Nations Security Council’s condemnation of the April 5 launching.

North Korea insists it sent a satellite into space, but regional powers and the United States said that nothing reached orbit and that the launching was a test of long-range missile technology.

Sunday’s announcement came a day after North Korea’s military warned South Korea to stay out of a United States-led security initiative aimed at halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

An unidentified North Korean military spokesman said South Korea’s full participation in the plan, the Proliferation Security Initiative, would be seen “as a declaration of undisguised confrontation and a declaration of a war” against North Korea.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry expressed regret over the North’s threats and said joining the program would not be a “declaration of confrontation or war.”