The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
– Gleaming towers –
A promotional video for Han’s project takes in beach resorts, the Masikryong skiing centre, and Mount Kumgang, renowned throughout the peninsula for its beauty.
It shows the port of Wonsan transformed into a mass of gleaming towers, shopping, entertainment and trade districts, served by multiple transport links including a dual carriageway with four lanes in each direction –- a far cry from the bumpy potholed road with unlit tunnels that currently links it to Pyongyang.
Air routes from China, Russia and Japan are also displayed, but no regular international flights have so far been scheduled to Wonsan’s newly-built airport.
In 2015, said Han’s colleague Ri Kyong-Chol, there had been negotiations to start direct flights to Beijing and Shanghai. But “since then, because of political circumstances, the participants of the other side balked”.
The vast majority of foreign tourists to North Korea are Chinese.
Han was unable to put a cost on the scheme. Foreign investment would be welcome, but so far none had been forthcoming due to US sanctions, he said.
Hundreds of thousands of South Koreans used to visit Mount Kumgang every year, travelling to a Seoul-funded tourist resort that was the first major inter-Korean cooperation project.
But that came to an abrupt end in 2008 when a North Korean soldier shot dead a South Korean tourist who strayed off the approved path and Seoul suspended the trips.
New South Korean president Moon Jae-In favours engagement with the North to bring it to the negotiating table as well as sanctions.
In a five-year plan unveiled last week, his government said it would move to resume tours to Mount Kumgang and re-open the shuttered Kaesong Joint Industrial Zone, where South Korean firms employed tens of thousands of North Korean workers, “when conditions are ripe”.
But the North’s tourism development plan did not factor in visitors from the other side of the divided peninsula, Han said.
“We don’t need to think of them,” he said. “North and South should cooperate among themselves but because of US sanctions, this is not being done. Southern authorities have no intention to do so either.”
