SKorea says talks with NKorea will go ahead despite North’s threat to break off dialogue

SKorea: Talks with North still on despite threats

SEOUL, South Korea — North and South Korea will hold talks this week on developing their joint industrial complex in the North despite Pyongyang’s threat to break off all dialogue and negotiations, an official said Monday.

Following reports of a South Korean contingency plan to handle any unrest in the isolated North, Pyongyang threatened Sunday launch a “sacred nationwide retaliatory battle” and vowed to cease all communication with the South.

But Unification Ministry spokeswoman Lee Jong-joo said that the North has informed her government that it will allow Seoul officials to cross the border to attend Tuesday’s talks in the city of Kaesong.

The talks will allow the two sides to assess their joint tour of industrial parks in China and Vietnam undertaken last year to get ideas about how to further develop the Kaesong complex.

Kaesong, which combines South Korean capital and technology with cheap North Korean labor, is the most prominent symbol of inter-Korean cooperation. About 110 South Korean factories employ some 40,000 North Korean workers.

Also Monday, North Korea issued a statement renewing the country’s demand that international sanctions be lifted before it will return to stalled negotiations aimed at ending its nuclear weapons programs.

The statement, issued by North Korea’s Foreign Ministry, said “it is nonsensical for the (North) to sit at the negotiating table with those countries that violate its sovereignty.”

Last year, Pyongyang quit the six-party talks — with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States — in anger over international condemnation of a prohibited long-range rocket launch.

The North “is not opposed to the six-party talks and has no ground whatsoever to delay them,” the statement said, but added that it would not return to them while under sanctions.

“The dignity of (North Korea) will never allow this to happen,” the statement said.

The U.N. Security Council slapped tough new sanctions on the North in June, strengthening an arms embargo and authorizing ship searches on the high seas, following the missile launch and an underground nuclear test.

The North has also said in recent days that it would not return to the nuclear negotiations before the signing of a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. Fighting in the 1950-53 conflict was stopped by a truce, not a treaty.

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry told the North that the issues of sanctions and a treaty could be discussed only after the Pyongyang makes progress toward denuclearization.

Despite a series of threats last week, the impoverished North has also been reaching out to its rival in Seoul in what could be an attempt to win economic aid to relieve some of the pressure of the U.N. sanctions.

South Korea announced Friday that North Korea agreed to accept 10,000 tons of food aid which Seoul offered late last year to help relieve Pyongyang’s chronic food shortages. It would be Seoul’s first direct aid to the country under conservative Lee.

Lee’s administration, however, still refuses to resume full-scale assistance, demanding that Pyongyang make progress in efforts to dismantle its nuclear weapons.