Change Comes by Way of Resort in North Korea
By Michael Mosettig | November 13, 2007 | Korea
Had Prince Potemkin been a 21st century man, he would have gone into the luxury hotel business.
With help from South Korea and one of its major corporations (the Hyundai chaebol), North Korea presents a deluxe picture to more than 1.5 million tourists, nearly all from South Korea, who have arrived at the Mount Kumgang resort, a complex of nine hotels and lodges as well as a spa, gift shops and a coffee stand that sells lattes at Starbucks prices.
Hiking trail in North Korean mountains. Photo Credit: Michael MosettigThe attraction, beyond the exotic of going into previously forbidden territory, is one of Korea's most famous mountain ranges in a nation where mountains have drawn nature lovers and artists over centuries. The complex is a four-hour drive northeast of Seoul, just off the coast of the East Sea/Sea of Japan and whose coves remind an American of the Maine coast. The main activity is hiking up mountain trails, viewing along the way inscriptions dedicated to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong IL Hiking here, however, is not for those seeking solitude. Rather it is sharing narrow, rocky trails with several hundred of your newly acquired best Asian friends as convoys of up to 20 buses deposit their charges at the foot of the mountain. Evening entertainment includes passable restaurants and a spectacularly good troupe of acrobats, gymnasts and trapeze artists.
Indeed, everything about traveling here is a group activity. There are no solo tourists. Even the approximately 2,000 Americans who have visited here, such as our group of editors and producers, arrive in groups organized by Hyundai. A one-night tour package that includes breakfast and bus transport can run US$500 per night.
And visiting a country that has kept itself pretty well sealed off from the rest of the world for the past 50 plus years comes with its own rules and regulations. Before arriving at the Demilitarized Zone that separates the two Koreas, visitors must hand over all newspapers and magazines as well as cell phones and video and audio recording equipment. They are advised not to do anything that would \"aggravate or insult the North Korean people.\" Don't take photos of soldiers anywhere and certainly not in the North Korean customs and immigration building where a recording loops a bouncy version of a song whose main lyrics seemed to be, \"Thank you for visiting North Korea.\" One hapless South Korean was aiming his camera, and amid a blare of whistles was separated from his group and hauled away. For all we know, he may still be there.
In the hotel itself, it was all smiles and greetings in English from a young and attractive staff. The party cadres can be identified by lapel pins bearing the images of the Great Leader and Dear Leader. Some can be quite chatty, others less so. The best and the brightest appear to be from the capital, Pyongyang, raising the likelihood they got their jobs through party and family connections and may be training either for future jobs in business management or intelligence.
Visits are limited to two or three days, and all transactions are in hard currency, U.S. dollars or South Korean won. The tourist complex originally was supposed to be a center for family reunions between North and South, but only a handful has taken place there. It is one of two major South Korean/Hyundai investments in North Korea. The other is the Kaesung industrial complex, where South Korean companies provide the capital investment and North Korea provides the labor at $60 a month minimum. For North Korea and the South Korean companies, it's a win/win proposition. The companies get both cheap labor and the chance to say they are promoting inter-Korean peace. North Korea gets desperately needed foreign currency. Salaries are paid through the North Korean government, leaving no assurance all the money reaches the workers.
Stephen Linton giving presentation on health system. Photo Credit: Ray Locker of USA TodayEven our trip provided its small example of how the North Korean government is selective in what it shares with the outside world. Requests to go to Pyongyang and Kaesung were turned down. But our group did have a chance earlier in our stay to speak to an American considered by many analysts as well-informed as any foreigner on life inside North Korea. He's Stephen Linton, a descendent of Presbyterian missionaries and now chairman of the Eugene Bell Foundation (Saemsori.org). His mission, on an admittedly small scale, is to help North Korean doctors and clinics fight tuberculosis, which he describes as \"the number one, two and three health challenges\" facing North Korea. He says most Koreans, even in the South, have been exposed to the disease and that TB has \"killed more people in a generation than the Korean War (which cost an estimated 800,000 to a million lives).\"
In his small quarters in Seoul (the foundation does not have an office in the North), Linton described what happens to a universal health care system when the money supposed to run it (in this case from the government) is diverted to other priorities. In subdued tones, he talked of surgery performed in hospitals without lighting, patients anesthetized only with ether because the anesthesia machines were broken, doctors exposing themselves to radiation poisoning and burns with worn out X-ray equipment. And ultimately doctors walking away from their clinics because they were not being paid and needed to support themselves and their families taking jobs running sewing machines at the Kaesung industrial complex or becoming farmers.
\"In this society, there is a capacity for enduring pain that is almost unbelievable,\" Linton said.
Despite the gruesome portrayal of North Korean health care, Linton said the country is rebounding from the famine of the 1990s and that people are eating and dressing better. He certainly sees no collapse of the ruling hierarchy or repudiation of the entire system. Like other analysts here, he predicts more of an evolution to a Chinese system rather than an East German style meltdown.
For other analysts in and out of government, that translates into a leadership that will do anything to ensure it survival. And curiously enough, according to one line of analysis, that adds up to doing a deal with the United States and the other nations in the six-party talks to give up its nuclear weapons. The nuclear test was the wakeup call North Korea wanted to make the U.S. pay it some attention, according to this line of thought, and now the North is ready to trade in weapons it never planned to use to obtain the aid and material it desperately needs.
That is not a line of thinking accepted at some Washington think tanks, but it is the prevailing wisdom at the moment in Seoul. It has the apparent advantage of proximity, but there are some who recall that the last people to predict the 1989 demise of East Germany were officials in West Germany.
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