SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Thursday that it would freeze all South Korean assets at a joint industrial complex the South shut down to retaliate for a recent nuclear test and a rocket launch by the North.
It also ordered all 248 South Korean managers in the factory park in the North Korean town of Kaesong expelled by 5 p.m. Thursday, allowing them to return home with only their personal belongings. The North said it would sever all communication across the border after the last of the South Koreans left.
In addition, it said it was shutting down the only cross-border highway open between the two Koreas. The road has linked South Korea with the factory park since 2004, when it began operations just over the western inter-Korean border. The zone will return to the control of the North Korean military, it said.
The blizzard of retaliatory actions from the North came a day after South Korea said it was closing the Kaesong park because it had served as a source of cash for the North to help finance its nuclear and long-range missile programs, both banned under various U.N. Security Council resolutions.
South Korea's action was "a declaration of an end to the last lifeline of the North-South relations" and "driving the situation in the Korean Peninsula to the brink of a war," said a statement from the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, a North Korean government agency in charge of relations with the South.
"The South Korean puppet group will experience what disastrous and painful consequences will be entailed by its action," it said, calling the South Korean president, Park Geun-hye, "a traitor for all ages."
The Kaesong complex had been the last functioning project of inter-Korean cooperation dating from the "Sunshine Policy" era, from 1998 to 2008, when South Korea began a series of joint ventures with the North. The decision to close the park signaled an end to a South Korean belief in using economic cooperation to chip away at decades of political mistrust on the divided peninsula and move toward eventual reunification.
After the North's nuclear test last month and a long-range rocket test on Sunday, South Korea has aggressively shifted to a policy of applying tough sanctions on the North. While urging other countries, especially China, to do likewise, Park's government took the lead by shutting down the Kaesong complex, an important source of cash for the North.
The corridor linking Kaesong and Seoul, the South Korean capital, was the main invasion route for North Korean troops during the 1950-53 Korean War and was at one time the most heavily guarded section of the 155-mile border.
After a historic inter-Korean summit meeting in 2000 in which the two sides agreed to promote reconciliation, the hard-line North Korean People's Army grudgingly stepped aside as South Korean engineers removed barbed-wire fences, tank traps and minefields to build the highway across the border.
The Kaesong complex began as a pilot project to combine South Korean manufacturing skills with cheap North Korean labor. Eventually, more than 45,000 North Koreans worked for 123 South Korean-owned factories there. The plants produced more than $515 million worth of textiles, electronic parts and other labor-intensive goods last year, according to the South Korean government.
But South Korea suspected that the North had taken the bulk of the $560 million South Korean factories had paid to its workers since 2004 and used the money for its nuclear weapons and missile development.
North Korea's reaction Thursday had been expected. When South Korea stopped sending tourists to the North's scenic Diamond Mountain after Northern soldiers shot and killed a Southern tourist there in 2008, the North froze and confiscated all South Korean properties there.
The assets North Korea vowed to freeze in Kaesong included $852 million worth of investments South Korea poured into factories, roads and other facilities there, as well as millions of dollars' worth of finished goods that the South Korean factory managers now cannot bring home.
The two Koreas had agreed as recently as 2013 that they would not shut down Kaesong for political reasons "under any circumstances." The South reiterated on Thursday that it would provide financial aid to prevent the factory owners from going bankrupt and help them find new sites for their operations.
Some of the South Korean factory supervisors were able to leave Kaesong on Thursday before the North Korean announcement. They looked like a caravan of refugees streaming across the border, their cars and trucks bulging with cargo as they tried to bring home as many finished goods as they could.