The top South Korean official charged with handling North-South relations says the time has come for South Korean workers still at the shuttered Kaesong factory zone to return home. 
 
 
 
 Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae said Friday that the government has made an "unavoidable decision" to bring about 180 South Korean workers home. 
 
 
 
 The decision came hours after North Korea rejected the South's proposal for formal negotiations to restart operations at the Kaesong complex. 
 
 
 
 Seoul gave Pyongyang 24 hours on Thursday to agree to talks, warning of a tough response if Pyongyang did not agree to the offer. 
 
 
 
 Hours after the deadline passed Friday, Pyongyang dismissed the offer and warned that it would be the first to take tough action if the South insists on worsening the situation at the border town. 
 
 
 
 South Korean President Park Geun-hye met with her security-related Cabinet ministers on Friday, regarding fate of the Kaesong complex. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Operations at Kaesong, just north of the border, have been suspended since North Korea angrily pulled its workers and blocked South Korean access to the center earlier this month. 
 
 
 
 About 180 South Koreans remain there in hopes that production can resume, but they are thought to be quickly running out of food and supplies. 
 
 
 
 Kaesong is the last remaining symbol of cooperation between the two foes, and is seen as a bellwether of Korean relations. Although work at the center has been suspended during times of heightened tensions, it has never been shut down completely since it was established in 2004. 
 
 
 
 Though Pyongyang has refrained from making daily threats of violence against the South in recent days, tensions remain high on the Korean peninsula. 
 
 
 
 North Korea is angry over U.N. Security Council sanctions passed in response to Pyongyang's February nuclear test, as well as annual joint military exercises between South Korea and the United States. ||||| North Korean soldiers salute in front of Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, the mausoleum where the bodies of the late leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il lie embalmed, in Pyongyang on Thursday, April 25, 2013.... (Associated Press) 
 
 Seoul said Friday that it has decided to withdraw the roughly 175 South Koreans still at a jointly run factory complex in North Korea, raising a major question about the survival of the last symbol of inter-Korean cooperation. 
 
 The statement by the country's minister in charge of inter-Korean relations came after North Korea rejected Seoul's demand for talks on the factory park that has been closed nearly a month. 
 
 Seoul said it issued a Friday deadline for North Korea to respond to its call for talks because it was worried about its workers not having access to food and medicine. North Korea hasn't allowed supplies or workers to cross the border since early this month. 
 
 "We've made the inevitable decision to bring back all the remaining personnel in Kaesong for the protection of our people as their difficulties continue to grow," Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae said in a televised statement. He didn't take questions from reporters. 
 
 Ryoo urged North Korea to protect the property of South Korean companies at Kaesong and ensure the safety of South Korean managers when they return home. He didn't say when the withdrawal would take place. 
 
 Pyongyang's powerful National Defense Commission earlier said Seoul's demand for working-level talks was deceptive and that ongoing U.S.-South Korean military drills and the spreading of anti-North Korea leaflets at the border were proof of Seoul's insincerity. 
 
 "This is a war of pride between the Koreas, but they are conducting it while leaving some room for talks," Lee Hochul, a political science professor at Incheon National University in South Korea, said, adding neither side is mentioning a permanent shutdown of the industrial complex. 
 
 "Once drills end and tension subsides, they may try to revive contact over Kaesong," Lee said. 
 
 An association of South Korean businessmen with factories in Kaesong released a statement saying they were shocked at Seoul's decision to pull the workers out. 
 
 The park in the North Korean border town of Kaesong is the most significant casualty so far in the recent deterioration of relations between the Koreas. Pyongyang barred South Korean managers and cargo from entering North Korea early this month, then recalled the 53,000 North Koreans who worked on the assembly lines. More than 800 South Korean managers were stationed in Kaesong before the ban. 
 
 "If they are truly worried about the lives of South Korean personnel in the (complex), they may withdraw all of them to the south side where there are stockpiles of food and raw materials and sound medical conditions," the statement from an unidentified spokesman for the North's National Defense Commission said Friday. It added that North Korea would guarantee the workers' safety during the withdrawal. 
 
 "If the South's puppet group looks away from reality and pursues the worsening of the situation, we will be compelled to first take final and decisive grave measures," the statement said. 
 
 The statements on Kaesong this week follow what had been something of a lull after a weeks-long tirade of warlike North Korean rhetoric that included threats of nuclear war and missile strikes. Tension rose as Seoul responded with its own tough language to Pyongyang's outburst, which was unusually violent, even by the standards of the already hostile relationship between the Koreas. 
 
 Meanwhile, the military drills continue. On Friday, airplanes flew over South Korea's southeastern city of Pohang and amphibious vessels landed on the coast. North Korea calls the drills, which are set to end Tuesday, war preparations. 
 
 "Even at this moment, South Korea is ramping up the intensity of coastal landing drills with the United States in the east, driving the already tense situation to a point of explosion," North Korea said in its statement. It said the annual drills and the scattering of North Korean leaflets along the border belie the South Korean government's calls for talks. 
 
 The Kaesong complex has operated with South Korean know-how and technology and with cheap labor from North Korea since 2004. It weathered past cycles of hostility between the rivals, including two attacks blamed on North Korea in 2010 that killed 50 South Koreans. 
 
 "Seoul has executed a high-stakes gambit" by deciding to pull South Korean workers from Kaesong, said Kim Han-jung, a Yonsei University professor who once served as an aide to liberal President Kim Dae-jung, under whom the idea of the park was conceived. "The deadlock over the park is likely to persist for a long time. It will take a lot of political effort to restore it." 
 
 Both analysts said that Pyongyang could confiscate South Korean properties in Kaesong in the worst scenario as it did in 2010 at a South Korean-built mountain resort on North Korea's east coast. The cross-border tourism project came to a halt in 2008 after a South Korean tourist was fatally shot by a North Korean guard at the Diamond Mountain resort. 
 
 Impoverished North Korea objects to views in South Korea that the Kaesong park is a source of badly needed hard currency. South Korean companies paid salaries to North Korean workers averaging $127 a month, according to South Korea's government. That is less than one-sixteenth of the average salary of South Korean manufacturer workers. 
 
 Pyongyang also has complained about alleged South Korean military plans in the event the North held the Kaesong managers hostage. 
 
 A South Korean employee at Kaesong said she watched the ministry's briefing on television. She did not know whether she would leave Kaesong because her company's headquarters in the South had not called her yet. 
 
 "I've been staying here to protect our factory and our goods," she said when reached by phone, declining to be identified because her company asked her not to speak to the media. She has been in Kaesong since April 2, one day before North Korea blocked entry to South Korean workers, and has been eating rice and noodles, she said. One other colleague is staying with her. 
 
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 AP writer Youkyung Lee contributed to this report. ||||| South Korean vehicles, transporting both South Korean employees working at North Korea's Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC) and products made in KIC, head towards the South's Customs, Immigration and Quarantine (CIQ), just south of the demilitarised zone separating the two... 
 
 PAJU, South Korea Hundreds of South Koreans rejected the chance to leave factories in North Korea on Thursday that have become the center of a bitter standoff between the two countries, running the risk of becoming hostages to keep their plants going. 
 
 For those whose commute to work already involved a trip across the world's most heavily fortified border and into one of its most repressive states, this week's tensions were another reminder of their precarious livelihoods. 
 
 It also showed how South Koreans have become largely inured to threats from their impoverished and bellicose neighbor. 
 
 On Wednesday, Pyongyang barred access to the Kaesong Industrial park, where 123 mostly small South Korean firms employ 50,000 North Korean workers to make clothing, shoes and other goods. 
 
 "I have four dependents in my family. We didn't go there for political reasons, we were there to make our living," said Kwon Bo-sun, a 44-year-old trailer driver who was waiting at the South Korean border town of Paju to see if he would be allowed to truck supplies into the zone. 
 
 Pyongyang has allowed South Korean factory managers and workers to leave Kaesong, about 5 km (3 miles) inside North Korea. 
 
 But out of 828 people who spent the night there just 222 had indicated they wanted to return to South Korea on Thursday, with the rest continuing to try to keep their factories running. 
 
 Many South Koreans waited all day on Thursday at Paju, hoping to get in. Some expressed concern that a cut in gas supplies would affect the operation of equipment at their factories. One worker who returned asked reporters not to sensationalize the standoff. 
 
 The companies are estimated to have invested around $500 million in the park since it was inaugurated in 2000. 
 
 South Korean corporate giants such as Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor, the sort of companies that could sustain losses from the park's closure, do not have operations in Kaesong. 
 
 The North warned again on Thursday that it would close the zone in reprisal for what it sees as "hostile" military exercises by the United States and South Korea which have been beefed up in response to Pyongyang's threats of war. 
 
 Many South Koreans are used to the rhetoric from North Korea, which remains technically at war with both the South and with the United States after an armistice rather than a peace treaty ended the 1950-53 Korean conflict. 
 
 North Korea has now staged three nuclear weapons tests, the most recent in February, which drew new sanctions from the United Nations. 
 
 It shelled a South Korean island in 2010 and is blamed for killing 46 South Korean sailors when a naval vessel was torpedoed in the same year. 
 
 Pyongyang has in the past also launched commando raids, tried to kill South Korean presidents, bombed an airliner and killed South Korean government officials in a bombing overseas. 
 
 "It is true most people involved in Kaesong do not have that sense of urgent risk to their personal safety," said a business executive with operations there who declined to be identified for fear his business could be affected. 
 
 KAESONG, A BAROMETER OF FAITH IN UNITED KOREA 
 
 The economic zone generates $2 billion a year in trade and pays an average $130 a month in wages to North Koreans who might otherwise struggle to find a job in an economy that has shrunk over the past 20 years. 
 
 It is also practically the last vestige of the "Sunshine Policy" of rapprochement between the two Koreas and a powerful symbol that the divided country could one day reunify. 
 
 Even as North Korea's propaganda machine hurled more insults at Seoul on Thursday, it appeared that a sense of solidarity between Koreans in the zone was still holding. 
 
 "When food supplies come in from the North, (they are) sharing some with the South Korean workers there," said Park Yun-kyu, an executive. 
 
 Most food supplies are usually shipped in from South Korea, which has not happened now for two days. 
 
 Other South Koreans who have been in the zone said North Korean workers had been less friendly this week. 
 
 There were brief jitters in Seoul's financial markets when one South Korean businessman said the North would close the zone on April 10. 
 
 The South's Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean relations, denied the reports and said the North wanted to be told of scheduled plans for workers leaving over the next week. 
 
 "The North's request to several companies for a schedule of people returning to the South by April 10 has been distorted to say the North had requested a total pullout," the ministry said. 
 
 South Korea has had to submit a list of those wishing entry to the complex three days in advance. 
 
 North Korea itself has not issued a statement on restricting entry but on Thursday again threatened permanent closure if Seoul continued to offend a country that bridles at even the mildest criticism. 
 
 "If the South's puppet conservative group and its media continue bad-mouthing ... we will be taking the stern measure of pulling out all of our workers from the Kaesong industrial zone," its KCNA news agency said. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Christine Kim; Editing by Dean Yates)
– Nearly three weeks after North Korea pulled its 53,000 workers from the Kaesong Industrial Complex—a jointly managed industrial park just inside the North Korean border—the South Korean government is ordering its remaining citizens out, reports the Wall Street Journal. Despite the virtual shutdown of the complex, one of the last symbols of North-South cooperation, about 175 South Koreans had remained behind to ensure North Korea would not unilaterally confiscate the goods and machinery left there. But the AP reports Seoul was worried about its workers not having access to food and medicine; North Korea hasn't allowed supplies or workers to cross the border since early this month. Seoul had given Pyongyang 24 hours to agree to restarting talks, warning of serious consequences if the North said no, reports Voice of America. But the North let the deadline pass then issued a "no", along with a threat: If the South "pursues the worsening of the situation, we will be compelled to first take final and decisive grave measures," reads a statement issued today. "The government has made an inevitable decision to bring back home all of our citizens left behind in Kaesong for their protection," said South Korea's Unification Minister. "Their hardship is growing due to North Korea's unfair measures in Kaesong."