Big dreams, empty buildings at South Korean border

PAJU, South Korea, Dec 20 (Reuters) South Korea longs for the day when talks about the North's atomic ambitions fade away and its cavernous buildings to manage cross-border trade finally bustle with activity.

North Korea has been in international talks for more than 12 years on ending its nuclear weapons programme, with the latest round this week in Beijing.

Last year, South Korea opened two sleek checkpoints, built at a cost of 0 million, to process what it expects to be thousands of visitors a day crossing the border with the North once travel restrictions are lifted.

But for now, the South's Inter-Korean Transit Offices, just 40 km north of Seoul, are mostly empty.

''There are no regular customers, yet,'' said Jin Jung-nim, who spends her days dusting gift items from the border region in a shop where the loudest noise is the hum of fluorescent lights.

There is a brief flurry of activity in the mornings when the border crossing opens and trucks go to a South Korean factory park a few hundred metres north of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that separates the two countries still technically at war.

On average, just 270 people and 160 vehicles cross a day.

After that, counters are closed, lights are dimmed and bureaucrats vanish.

''In the future, I believe the volume of cars and people will be 10 or 20 times greater,'' Oh Nam-du, a deputy director at the checkpoint, told a group of visiting journalists today.

SEPARATE, NOT EQUAL South Korea sees the Kaesong Industrial Park just across the border as a model for eventual unification where businesses from the South use cheap North Korean labour and land to make goods.

There are about 8,000 North Korean workers at 15 South Korean-run companies at the factory park.

Operator Hyundai Asan, part of the giant Hyundai Group, has plans for more than a half million North Koreans to work there and turning it into a city with hotels and golf courses.

The South has built highways, a train line and a station where signs point the way to a yet-to-exist express to Pyongyang.

Analysts say North Korea's leaders are in no hurry to open the border that much, fearful of showing its citizens how far the communist state has lagged behind its wealthy neighbour.

Despite the dreams for unity, the DMZ is the Cold War's last frontier and one of the world's most fortified borders.

There is a marked landmine field a few hundred metres from the new customs house. A few kilometres away, troops from the two Koreas exchange glares and curses at the only place where they regularly come into contact -- the DMZ's Joint Security Area.

And the North Korean troops have not stopped their unique way of showing disrespect, by walking barefoot on desks at a UN hut that straddles the border used for military talks.

''They do these sort of things to provoke us,'' said South Korean Captain Lee Hyo-sung.

REUTERS LL VV1618