The complex earns Mr Kim and his cronies $80m a year in badly needed hard currency.
North Korea had also continued its support of the plant, which provided badly needed hard currency, through previous diplomatic crises.
In addition to the costly sanctions, the North has lost badly needed hard currency earned by its workers at the Kaesong complex.
Since the 1970s, the North Korean government has been accused of condoning, and even encouraging, its agencies to bring in badly needed hard currency through criminal activities, such as counterfeiting dollars and cigarettes, as well as selling weapons.
It has indicated that it is willing to sacrifice the complex, and $90 million in badly needed hard currency that its workers earn annually, to show its anger at South Korea's policy toward the North.
Economists say Egypt's military rulers contributed to the strain by shunning the planned loan from the I.M.F. last June, when it could have provided badly needed hard currency and a financial seal of approval that might have helped reassure foreign investors and aid donors.
I sing, badly, "A Hard Day's Night" to much merriment.Despite the confidence of a former American ambassador to South Korea, Donald Gregg, who told me last night that the Philharmonic's performance had been a "16-inch broadside of soft power into the hearts and minds" of North Koreans, my own efforts fail.
North Korea remains one of the world's most dangerous countries, with the world's third-largest army, large supplies of sarin gas and the smallpox virus, advanced missile technology (which it readily exports to dubious buyers in return for badly needed hard currency), and, in all likelihood, a supply of plutonium.
The economy, victimized by years of mismanagement and burdened by debt, was paralyzed, dependent on the copper mines that earned badly-needed hard currency for state coffers.
The complex employs an estimated 50,000 North Korean workers and is a source of badly-needed hard currency for the North.
