North Korea’s military unit at its Diamond Mountain resort said in a statement that on Sunday it will begin ejecting from the resort South Korean personnel deemed “unnecessary” because the South “is pushing the North-South relations to a graver stage.”
North Korea says an army guard fatally shot a 53-year-old South Korean housewife at the resort last month because she entered a restricted military area and ignored a warning to stop.
South Korea suspended its decade-old tour program to the resort in response, demanding North Korea allow South Korean investigators into the area. The North has refused and told the South to apologise for halting the tours.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which is responsible for relations with North Korea, said businessmen and workers at the resort have been returning home voluntarily. About 160 South Koreans remain at the resort and most will leave by mid-August, the ministry said.
“We hope this case will be resolved swiftly and smoothly,” Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon said on Saturday.
North Korea said it would evict the South Koreans in stages, starting with tourism officials and workers.
South Korea has sought international support to pressure the North to accept an investigation. Earlier this week, US President George W Bush said during a visit to Seoul that he was urging North Korea to engage in dialogue with South Korea to resolve the case and prevent similar incidents.
In Saturday’s statement, North Korea criticised South Korean President Lee Myung-bak for “clinging to the coattail of his American master” and “begging him to urge the North to opt for ‘probing the truth’” of the shooting case.
“The Lee Myung-bak group had better face up to the serious situation and behave with discretion,” said the statement, carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.
North Korea also said it would take “strong military sanctions” against any breach of the rules at the mountain resort and would limit the passage of South Koreans and their vehicles through the border crossing leading there.
Ties between the divided Koreas have been strained since Lee took office in February with a promise to get tougher on impoverished, isolationist North Korea. The North subsequently cut off all government-level contact with Seoul.
On Friday, athletes from the two Koreas marched separately in the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. The Koreas had marched together in the same uniform under a blue and white “unification flag” in major international sporting events since the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
“There are some problems in South-North relations but we will surely overcome those,” Lee said in a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao on Saturday in Beijing, according to South Korean media pool reports.
Tours of the mountain resort, run by South Korea’s Hyundai Asan company, are one of the major inter-Korean reconciliation projects initiated by Lee’s liberal predecessors and a source of hard currency for the cash-strapped North. About 1.9 million visitors, mostly South Koreans, have traveled to the resort since it opened in 1998.
The 1950-53 Korean War ended with a cease-fire, not a peace treaty, which means the peninsula remains technically at war.