North Korea "Welcomes" Visitors

From a report by Andrei Lankov published in the Asia Times regarding South Koreans being allowed for the last two months to visit the historic North Korean city of Kaesong, mere miles north from Seoul:

The day-trip program is a small but, arguably, significant breach in Kim Jong-il's walled communist "paradise."

Of course, North Korean authorities went to extraordinary lengths to prevent any interaction between locals and visitors. The list of prohibited items is quite impressive. Tourists cannot take any kind of printed material, computers and computer equipment, mobile phones, radios and video cameras, universal serial bus and other memory devices. The old film cameras are banned as well. Only digital cameras are allowed into the North, since at the border check point North Korean police officials check every single picture taken by every single tourist.

The rules for taking pictures are simple: everything which is not explicitly allowed is forbidden. Tourists can take pictures only at designated stops, and only historical monuments can be depicted. No pictures of the city streets and local people are allowed (obviously because the North Korean leaders know how unflattering those images if seen by South Koreans).

The only exception is made for the statues and portraits of Great Leader Kim Il-sung as well as portraits of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il. However, those pictures should be taken with very special care: the images of the great men should be seen in full, and be placed in strictly vertical position.

The 10 South Korean buses, accompanied by a few South Korean jeeps as well as North Korean police vehicles, move in a column. Every bus has two North Korean "guides". These are men in their late 20s and 30s, remarkably fit and equipped with walkie-talkies. One "guide" stands in front of the bus, while another takes a seat at the back. On stops, they make sure that none of the tourists venture more than a couple of meters from the designated path.

Uniformed and armed policemen are placed at regular intervals along the entire route. When buses stop at a designated spot, the police cordon does not allow locals to approach closer than 100 meters (well, not quite: in some cases locals are allowed to use another side of a broad street).

The one-day bus trip is pricey at $190 and, even though it's in by 10 AM and out by 5 PM, it offers South Koreans the opportunity to notice the absence of cars, the low-quality housing with some windows covered with vinyl instead of glass, and the overall shoddiness and poverty of North Korean life. Also glaringly obvious is the difference in height between the North and South Koreans, a direct result of southerners growing up with protein-rich diets while the northerners only survived with chronic food shortages.

And just as, or even more, important is that the North Koreans are given a glimpse of the relative affluence of the average South Korean which contradicts the incessant propaganda of the Kim Jong-il regime. Agreed, the trips are tightly controlled but the North Koreans are not blind and they do talk to each other. The long-term effect of the day-trips will enlighten more and more North Koreans to the brutality of their communist regime.

Companion post at The Jawa Report.