N. Korea draws tourists despite infamy
pyongyang — The Westerners lined up on Sunday before giant statues of North Korea’s founder Kim Il-Sung and his son and successor Kim Jong-Il and, on command from their guide, bowed deeply.
It is a ritual that the Trump administration intends to stop US tourists performing, with Washington due to impose a ban this week on its citizens holidaying in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), as the North is officially known.
The move comes amid heightened tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile ambitions — it launched a rocket earlier this month which specialists say could reach Alaska or Hawaii — and after the death of US student Otto Warmbier, who had been imprisoned for more than a year by Pyongyang.
Warmbier was convicted of crimes against the state and sentenced to 15 years’ hard labour for trying to steal a propaganda poster from a Pyongyang hotel. He was sent home in June in a mysterious coma that proved fatal soon afterwards.
Most tourists to North Korea are motivated by curiosity and the desire to experience a different destination. The iconic 20-metre-high statues at Mansu hill look out over Pyongyang and groups of North Koreans in suits and ties arrive regularly to pay their respects. Passing traffic is obliged to slow down.
As the tourists reached the platform speakers played “We miss our general”, about Kim Jong-Il, the father of current leader Kim Jong-Un. “President Kim Il-Sung liberated our country and built a people’s paradise on this land,” they were told.
Call centre manager Kyle Myers, 28, from Ireland, said he wanted “to go somewhere very different from what I’m used to” for his first trip to Asia, “to see something that not a lot of people from back home have seen”.
The mounting tensions in the year since he booked the tour had made him nervous, he said, but he added: “I don’t see the threat here for tourists as long as they behave themselves and they follow the rules of the country.”
Australian IT manager Pallavi Phadke, 43, was among those who placed a bouquet before the statues. It was “a sign of respect”, she told. “It’s the same as covering your head when you go to a mosque or removing your shoes when you go to a temple. “The people seem happy, they certainly don’t appear to be oppressed or anything,” she said. “They’re very proud of their country, they’re proud of their his-
The people (north Koreans) seem happy, they certainly don’t appear to be oppressed or anything. They’re very proud of their country, they’re proud of their history and it’s nice to watch them be patriotic. Pallavi Phadke, An Australian IT Manager
tory and it’s nice to watch them be patriotic.”
Many disagree, with the United Nations, multiple Western governments and independent groups accusing Pyongyang of widespread human rights violations.
Other tourists were more sceptical. Mark Hill, a writer and editor from Calgary in Canada, compared the statues to “a very grim Mount Rushmore”. For years the US State Department has warned its citizens against travelling to North Korea, telling them that they are “at serious risk of arrest and long-term detention under North Korea’s system of law enforcement”, which “imposes unduly harsh sentences for actions that would not be considered crimes in the United States”, including showing disrespect to the country’s leaders and proselytising. It is “entirely possible that money spent by tourists in the DPRK” goes to fund its weapons programmes, it adds. The ban will go into force 30 days after it is formally declared, said department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, and “US passports will be invalid for travel to, through and in North Korea”. The vast majority of tourists are from China, its sole major ally and key provider of trade and aid. Americans make up around 20 per cent of the 4,000 to 5,000 Western tourists who go to the country each year, according to Simon Cockerell of Koryo Tours, the leader in the niche market, which brought Sunday’s visitors to Pyongyang.
Warmbier’s death had already hammered the market, he said, with bookings down 50 per cent since then. —