AFP/KNCA via KNSChildren celebrate the Chinese New Year in Pyongyang
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 19:21
-
Sjoerd den Daas
correspondent China
-
Sjoerd den Daas
correspondent China
On a winter sports holiday in North Korea, a summer holiday on the North Korean beach? After four years of self-isolation, the most closed country in the world is once again opening the door to foreign visitors. The strict quarantines have been abolished, the fear of the coronavirus seems to be gone. Yet not many people are coming in yet: initially it concerns mainly small numbers of Russians and Chinese.
“The largest group in fifty years,” authorities in the nearby Russian region of Primorye are calling the 400 Russian tourists who traveled through North Korea over the past four days. They came from all parts of the country, from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, according to a post on Facebook from the Russian embassy in Pyongyang.
‘Additional income is welcome’
North Korea has big plans. Through trial and error, a tourist zone is being created around the beaches of Wonsan-Kalma. According to RIA, 17 hotels and 37 inns are being built for Russian tourists.
Because even though North Korea earns billions of dollars from the theft of cryptocurrency, weapons supplies and forced labor, additional income is welcome for Kim Jong-un’s regime. “It provides diversification,” says Colin Zwirko. He researches public sources around North Korea and scours satellite images.
“Even though it may not make a lot of money in the bigger picture, they have already partly built it and will try to benefit from it,” Zwirko said. The project relies partly on Chinese investment, the most important economic lifeline for Pyongyang. It is not without reason that Chinese businessmen have been allowed to enter the country again for a long time.
Missiles
In recent months, Russia has further strengthened ties with North Korea. Washington says it has evidence that Pyongyang has supplied missiles to Russia. The Royal United Services Institute, a British military think tank, concluded based on satellite images that North Korea has shipped large quantities of ammunition to a military base near Vladivostok. Russia and North Korea have denied this.
“The Russian ambassador to North Korea, governors in the far eastern provinces, as well as Kremlin spokespeople have all said that the UN sanctions are a relic of a past that is now no longer relevant,” notes Chad O’Carrell of the Korea Risk Group. Everything is on the table: a broader deployment of North Korean forced laborers in the Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine is also being discussed.
Sending Russian tourists seems to be part of the trade-off, as well as possibly more access to Russian satellite technology. State-led tourism on a larger scale, as China organized in the years before corona. Big question: is North Korea still waiting for Western tourists? For them, the North Korean borders are currently still closed.
Debug embassies first
Travel organizations have not yet received signals about a rapid resumption of visa issuances. Western diplomats who fled their embassies in Pyongyang at the start of the Covid pandemic are also still on hold. “Even though it was mostly limited to Pyongyang, for a long time they were still able to share photos and videos of things that we otherwise wouldn’t see,” says O’Carroll about the absence of those Western “eyes and ears” in the closed country.
Germany, the United Kingdom and Sweden, among others, have embassies in the North Korean capital. It is unclear whether and when they will be allowed to return. “Those embassies have been abandoned for years and probably need to be debugged before they can be operational again,” O’Carroll says. Diplomats from Mongolia have already been allowed to return to their posts, as have Russian, Cuban and Chinese diplomats.
Contact with the population on a piecemeal basis
Several North Korean nationals living in China told NOS that they have not yet been able to return home to visit family. They do not yet estimate the chances that this will succeed this year as high. Different laws seem to apply to the Russians. Another trip to North Korea is already planned for March. It remains unclear whether a plane with Western tourists will follow later this year.
If it happens, it will remain limited, Zwirko thinks. From the authorities’ perspective, the risks are limited. Foreigners do not leave the tourist zones and will only come into contact with the North Korean population on a sparse basis. “This way they can control foreigners so they can’t distribute their Bibles or other things,” Zwirko says. “But if they make a little bit more money, why not? That will be the consideration.”
2024-02-13 18:21:46
#North #Korea #opening #door #Russian #Chinese #tourists
