North Korea creates 'Pyongyang time'

North Korea announced Friday it is creating its own time zone, moving its clocks backwards 30 minutes to create a new "Pyongyang time," the official KCNA news agency said.

The new time zone will place the standard time in North Korea at GMT +830, which is 30 minutes behind South Korea.

The time change is set to come into effect on August 15, which marks the 70th anniversary of the Korean peninsula's liberation from Japanese colonial rule from 1910-1945.

"The wicked Japanese imperialists committed such unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its standard time while mercilessly trampling down its land," the official KCNA news agency said.

In pre-colonial Korea, standard time had been set at GMT+830, but was changed to Japan standard time GMT+900 in 1912.

KCNA said the switch reflected "the unshakeable faith and will of the service personnel and people on the 70th anniversary of Korea's liberation."

Seoul's Unification Ministry, which deals with North Korean affairs, said the new time zone could pose a number of potential challenges, including operations at the jointly-run Kaesong industrial facility just inside North Korea.

"In the short term, there might be some inconvenience in entering and leaving Kaesong," ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-Hee told reporters Friday.

"And in the longer term, there may be some fallout for efforts to unify standards and reduce differences between the two sides," Jeong said.

South Korea moved similarly to change its standard time in 1954 to reflect the break from Japanese rule, but reverted back to Japan standard time in 1961 after General Park Chung-Hee came to power in a military coup.

Park believed that South Korea and Japan, as the two major US allies in the region, should operate in the same time zone to better conduct operational planning.

bw/sms (Reuters, AFP, dpa)