South Korea’s patience with North Korea is paper thin…
The government in Seoul has decided to sever all links with its communist rival as part of a fresh wave of sanctions sparked by Pyongyang’s Nuclear and missile program.
Last January 6, North Korea detonated a nuclear device, its fourth so far, then followed it up with a missile test on February 7.
The sanctions which were announced last Tuesday will include banning all the ships that have traveled to the North in the past 180 days. As well as banning South Korean banks and corporations from conducting business with thirty eight individuals and twenty four entities from North Korea, this will also include a Singaporean and Taiwanese individual with North Korean ties. It is hoped that now the doors are closed, it will lead to an opening to a peaceful road.
But if South Korea’s move was intended to make the North question its dangerous moves and spark a rehabbed relationship with it’s neighbor in the peninsula, things are not looking so hot. Pyongyang has chosen to hit back and has announced plans to ‘liquidate’ all of South Korea’s remaining assets in joint projects of the two nations located within the North’s territory.
The Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea , which is a department under the government of the North made the announcement last Thursday. Assets to be seized will include those at the scrapped resort project Diamond Mountain and the Kaesong industrial complex which was shut down over earlier diplomatic rows.
The North Korean government also made fun of South Korea’s sanctions referring to them as “laughable, unsightly” behavior, and then moved on to refer to its leader Park Geun-Hye as an ‘American prostitute.”But there is a spark in Geun-Hye, and she isn’t standing down. Earlier, she did not mince words when she called on “bone-numbing” penalties to be imposed against North Korea.