South Korea's vice unification minister will accompany lawmakers to an inter-Korean factory park in Gaeseong this week but will not meet with North Korean officials, the government said Monday.
The South Korean lawmakers on the Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee plan to travel to the Gaeseong Industrial Complex in the North Korean border town of the same name on Wednesday on a fact-finding mission to see how South Korean businesses are coping with normalizing operations there.
"Vice Minister Kim Nam-sik will accompany lawmakers to the North to fulfill protocol requirements," said unification ministry spokesman Kim Eui-do.
The North effectively closed down the industrial complex in early April amid heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula. It reopened five months later on Sept. 16, only after Pyongyang pledged not to disrupt operations for non-economic reasons. Most of the initial 123 South Korean firms have resumed operations at the joint factory complex and employ around 44,000 North Korean workers, roughly 80 percent of the workforce of 53,000 prior to the April shutdown.
Regarding the lawmakers' trip, Kim said that details regarding the itinerary should be finalized by Tuesday.
"Lawmakers will check on various infrastructure, tour South Korean companies and meet with business representatives," the spokesman said. He added that there are no plans by lawmakers to meet with North Korean officials.
Kim, meanwhile, said Seoul regrets Pyongyang's decision not to permit Rep. Cho Myung-chul to visit Gaeseong.
"It is regrettable that the North decided not to allow a particular person from visiting the complex," the official said.
The North on Saturday said that all lawmakers on the committee and their staff can visit Gaeseong, except Cho.
Cho, a former faculty member of the Kim Il-sung University, defected to the South in 1994 while studying in China and became a proportional representative of the ruling Saenuri Party in last year's legislative election. He is the first defector to sit in parliament. (Yonhap News)
