NYT. 20 January 2002. Vacationers in North Korea Kept Firmly in Their Place. Excerpts.
ONJUNG-RI -- At night, behind a seven-foot fence topped with both barbed wire and electric wire, the holiday lodge is an island of light, warmth and conviviality. Food fragrances waft from steam tables tended by cooks in white chef hats. In parts of Asia and Africa, fences around tourist enclaves routinely protect the affluent from the poor. But here in the only place where many South Koreans come close to North Koreans, the North has built fences to protect the poor from ideological contamination from the rich. Here at Mount Kumgang, on North Korea's east coast, five miles north of the demilitarized zone, the nation has created a strange foreign-exchange-making machine. Since the enterprise began three years ago, 400,000 South Koreans, about 1 percent of the entire southern population, have visited North Korean mountains and mineral baths, and they have had almost no contact with local villagers. Tourists travel for miles down fenced corridors, staring from bus windows at 19th-century agricultural landscapes they are forbidden to photograph. They leave behind the American dollars they spend on only those handicrafts provided by a state trading company. "The capitalist way of life is as harmful as a drug," a Korea Central News Agency editorial warned recently from Pyongyang, North Korea's capital. "It deprives people of conscience, morality, love, creative energy and enthusiasm and reduces them to animals and brutes. Introducing the capitalist way of life would bring socialism to a collapse and make the country and the nation fall prey to the imperialists." In this context, even South Korean garbage is considered subversive. Each cruise liner that brings several hundred tourists here also leaves with their garbage. It is a sign of the isolation [!?!]. "I have worked here for three months and I have never met anyone in the village," said Kim Han Soo, Hyundai's local manager, who lives with 230 other South Korean tourism workers in a compound tightly guarded by Korean People's Army units. [N.B.] His assistant, Han Keum Sub, who worked here two years ago, said he believed that the villagers were better off today than before. "Before, they had very shabby clothes," he said, basing his conclusion on observations made from a quarter of a mile away. "Now, we often see them riding bicycles, wearing better clothes." Segregation starts at the cruise ship terminal, where a specially built road leads to Hyundai's tourism complex: a mineral spa, two restaurants, handicrafts stores and a circus performance center. Through bus windows, tourists can see the villagers' road, running along an identical route. At every crossing a soldier stands guard. The main intersection has no traffic light, but there are two sentries and closed circuit cameras, evidently to prevent any forbidden mixing of the Koreans. Without a bus, car or horse in sight, North Koreans could be seen this week walking briskly. A few people pedaled bicycles, some pulled rubber-wheeled carts. >From the compound, heated and lit by a Hyundai generator, the view is largely blocked by gaily painted panel fencing. But behind the North Korean honey and candy boutique, a stretch of wire fencing seemed to dare the adventurous to risk a photo of the distant village. But on Tuesday afternoon, before the circus performance, the view offered more on closer examination. Low in the underbrush, what looked like a fur hat bobbed among the branches. On closer inspection, below the hat were the same red and gold army epaulets worn by sentries posted on the road. Even in nature -- pine forests sweeping up to crystalline mountains wreathed with white mists -- the human divisions are always close at hand. On one access road, parallel fences created a contamination corridor that ran for 10 miles, with a sentry posted every 500 yards. South Koreans, desperate to make human contact as they drove by in buses, opened their windows and doggedly waved into the rain. On a mountain hike, huge slogans written in Korean were carved into every major cliff face. "We should be honored by the fact that we adore our greatest leader Kim Il Sung, our greatest leader in 5,000 years," one 30-foot-high slogan said of the founder of North Korea, who died in 1994. In addition to the waterfalls and mountain views, one attraction of the mountain outing was a chance to meet real live North Koreans -- forest guides. There were two kinds: the ones wearing heavy black boots whose job was to help people over the rocks and the ones in light tennis shoes, virtually slippers, whose job, apparently, was to be engaging. At the end of the day, in the bus parking lot, the "boots" fraternized with the "boots," and the "slippers" fraternized with the "slippers." "He was very curious about the world, asking about the North Korean boat sunk by the Japanese, asking about the war in Afghanistan, asking who the U.S. might attack next," Suh Jin Won, a South Korean college student, said of a gregarious slipper with a bristle brush haircut who chatted with him halfway down the mountain. "No, I don't think he was an intelligence agent. He was just very friendly." As the convoy of blue and white Hyundai buses rolled out, the guides made little waves of goodbye, virtually in unison. On the approaches to this village, a North Korean woman was caught unexpectedly chatting with an army sentry at a footpath crossing. As the buses neared, she turned her back -- and her umbrella -- to the buses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews
