SEOUL, South Korea — Officials from South and North Korea met on their border on Saturday to discuss reopening a jointly operated industrial park and see if they were ready to move toward a thaw after months of tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula.
The Kaesong Industrial Zone, a factory park located just north of the heavily armed inter-Korean border, had been the last and best-known joint project of economic cooperation between North and South Korea until the North pulled out all its 53,000 workers in April. The South responded by withdrawing its factory mangers and engineers.
Both Koreas have since locked themselves in a tense standoff that has also become a test of will for the two relatively new governments in Pyongyang and Seoul.
The North has frequently threatened to shut down the complex for good but never did. The industrial park had been the only successful economic project of its kind for the isolated North. Its permanent closure would not only deprive North Korea of an important source of badly needed hard currency but also could scare away foreign investors its young leader, Kim Jong-un, wanted to attract.
The conservative government in Seoul, whose tough stand on North Korea remains popular among its people, insists that it has no intention of reopening the factory park unless North Korea convinces it that it will never again shut it down arbitrarily by citing political reasons. But the Kaesong complex remained the last remaining toehold for South Korea's efforts to use economic cooperation to help North Korea open up and move eventually toward the reunification of the peninsula.
Seo Ho, the chief South Korean delegate to the talks on Saturday, said that if the two Koreas could agree to reopen the factory park, it would be an important start for the "trust-building process" the South Korean government has insisted upon as a prerequisite for improving ties further with the North.
"We will try to build trust and cooperation in a small scale first as a stepping stone toward bigger trust and cooperation," Mr. Seo told reporters in Seoul on Saturday before heading to Panmunjom, a cluster of buildings on the border where the 1953 armistice was signed to halt the three-year Korean War.
The meeting on Saturday took place at a building on the North Korean side of Panmunjom.
On the eve of the talks, South Korea allowed three North Korean fishermen to return home on Friday through Panmunjom. A South Korean commercial ship rescued them on Wednesday when it found them adrift after their boat capsized off the east coast of the Korean Peninsula, Seoul officials said.
Also Friday, South Korea said that the women's national football team of North Korea will travel here for an East Asia Cup tournament later this month. The round-robin tournament among the two Koreas, China and Japan will last from July 20 to July 28. It will be the first time North Korean athletes have played on South Korean soil since 2009, when the two Koreas clashed in Seoul for an Asian qualifying match for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in soccer. South Korea won 1-0.
Both Koreas had agreed to hold cabinet minister-level talks in Panmunjom last month but canceled the plans at the last minute in mutual recriminations over who should lead their delegations. The meeting on Saturday was attended by lower-ranking representatives and confined to discussing the fate of the Kaesong complex.
Time is running out for both governments. With the onset of the monsoon season, factory managers said that their idled factories would soon start deteriorating unless they were restarted soon. Earlier this week, they urged the two Korean governments to reopen the complex soon or allow them to disassemble their facilities and relocate them elsewhere in Asia.
The Kaesong complex, where 123 textile and other labor-intensive factories from the South hired low-cost North Korean labor, had been in operation for eight years until North Korea unilaterally pulled out its workers. North Korea cited rising military tension as a reason, citing the tightening of international sanctions following its nuclear test in February and joint annual American-South Korean military exercises as sign of South Korean and American hostilities.
Conservative leaders in South Korea saw the North's move as typical of its brinkmanship and said they would no longer put up with North Korean tantrums.
The Kaesong complex had been the centerpiece of joint projects launched when the liberal governments in Seoul introduced a period of inter-Korean rapprochement between 1998 and 2008. All those projects were suspended as relations deteriorated in the later years. The current South Korean leaders were more skeptical of North Korea, which continued to develop its nuclear weapons programs despite years of economic aid and diplomatic engagement.
Their attitude was reflected in their repeated rejection of a North Korean proposal to meet in Kaesong. They insisted that both sides meet halfway, on the border.
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