International Crisis Group Advocates for Reopening the Kaesong Industrial Complex

The so called experts are again weighing in and recommending that President Trump reopen the Kaesong Industrial Complex to create “momentum” in the denuclearization talks whatever that means:

North Korea raked in more than $120 million a year from a symbolic cross-border industrial zone that Pyongyang and Seoul are pushing to re-open as part of nuclear negotiations, a report said Monday.

The Kaesong Industrial Complex — where around 55,000 North Korean workers churned out products ranging from watches to clothes for some 125 South Korean companies — was one of the most visible signs of reconciliation that followed the first inter-Korean summit in 2000.

But it was shuttered by the South’s then-conservative government in 2016 in response to a nuclear test and missile launches by the North, saying profits from Kaesong were funding Pyongyang’s provocations.

The South’s current President Moon Jae-in has dangled re-opening the complex as an incentive for Pyongyang to engage in denuclearisation talks, but doing so is complicated by the web of international sanctions imposed on the North over its weapons programmes.

At their Pyongyang summit in September, Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un agreed to “normalise” operations at Kaesong when conditions were “ripe”, but negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington are now deadlocked and Northern media have pressed the South to implement joint economic projects.

The International Crisis Group called on Monday for the complex to be reopened with “a modest deal involving sanctions relief”.

Doing so would create “much needed momentum for stalled peace talks and serve as a reminder to both North and South Korea of the benefits of building a sustainable peace on the peninsula”, it added in a statement.

AFP

You can read more at the link, but this is just more “pretend denuclearization” and something that the expert class has been calling for now for decades. These concessions to the Kim regime never work and I believe it actually makes it harder to reach a denuclearization deal because they use the funding to further their weapons programs.