Last chance to see North Korea for US tourists

Other tourists were more sceptical. Mark Hill, a writer and editor from Calgary in Canada, compared the statues to “a very grim Mount Rushmore”.

“It’s all very impressive and also a little disquieting,” he said.

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”.

– ‘Monolithic evil force’ –

The vast majority of tourists to North Korea are from China, its sole major ally and key provider of trade and aid.

Americans make up around 20 percent 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 percent since then.

“It’s would-be customers’ perceptions that anybody can make a mistake,” he told AFP. “And almost everyone in their lives has made some mistake and of course they don’t want the consequences of that mistake to be so devastating.”

But Washington’s move, he said, was self-defeating. As well as the potential ramifications for North Koreans who earn their living from tourism, he said, it would “completely eliminate any human interaction between United States citizens and North Korean citizens”.

Pyongyang’s state propaganda about the US was “100 percent negative”, he said, but contacts between tourists and locals “work against the idea that foreigners are some kind of monolithic evil force out to undermine the North Koreans”.

“The idea that tourism is somehow sustaining the government is absurd,” he added. “The numbers are very low, the revenues are very low.”

Young Pioneer Tours, the firm which brought Warmbier to the North, had already said it would no longer take US citizens to the country.

Among Sunday’s tour group was comedy writer Evan Symon, from Los Angeles, who as a result of Washington’s ban is likely to be one of the last American tourists to the country for several years.

“It’s just what happened,” he said. “Kind of cool in a way, I guess.”