While critics say traveling to North Korea puts money in the pockets of its repressive regime, those in favor say they are opening up the world's most isolated state to new ideas and opportunities.
Image: Reuters
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Human rights activist Ken Kato has called on foreign travel firms that are offering vacations in North Korea to withdraw from the country to assist the people of the repressive state, to safeguard regional security and for their own sakes.
"I am completely against these companies selling holidays in North Korea and they should be aware of exactly what is happening in the country," Kato, director of Tokyo-based Human Rights in Asia, told DW.
"If people in Europe had known what had been happening in Nazi Germany in 1938 or 1939, they would not have gone there on their holidays," he said. "It's just unimaginable.
"These companies, and the people who go on these tours, have to understand that the hard currency that North Korea earns from these holidays is spent on developing nuclear weapons, on its missile programs and on its military," he said.
"They should also withdraw to protect themselves," Kato added. "When the regime in North Korea collapses - as it will - then they will be in trouble in the same way as those who collaborated with the Nazis were in Europe in 1945. It's for their own safety."
UN sanctions on the North
Switzerland said it would not sell ski lifts to North Korea for its Masik Pass ski resort - shown here and aboveImage: AFP/Getty Images
The United Nations has imposed stringent sanctions against North Korea, designed to stop it acquiring weapons of mass destruction or the technology to develop similar systems domestically, as well as devices or knowhow that will permit it to further its nuclear research.
Companies that defy the resolutions adopted by the Security Council face punishment, and Kato believes travel firms sending tourists to North Korea should be covered under the same sanctions.
But operators of tours to North Korea strongly disagree with suggestions that they are legitimizing the existence of the regime or supporting it through the money their clients pay to go on the tours.
"For a country that imposes isolation on itself, I think it would be odd for us to contribute to isolating North Korea," said Nick Bonner, a British national who set up Koryo Tours in Beijing in 1993 and has since taken thousands of visitors to North Korea.
"We have 20 years of engagement there now and I firmly believe that if tourism is done well it can have a hugely positive impact," he said. "We are involved in orphanages, we have taken sports teams in there, we have been given great access to make three documentaries and a feature film, so I see what we're doing as a form of diplomacy."
Bonner points out that even if Western tour operators did choose to withdraw from North Korea, the regime has already instituted a policy of opening up - gradually - to tourists and if Westerners cannot go there, then there are plenty of Chinese who will fill their places.
Chinese tourists step in
An estimated 15,000 Chinese visited Pyongyang and the main tourist sites in North Korea last year, while a further 15,000 Chinese crossed the border with the North and visited towns and cities along the Tumen River.
"Another good reason for people to go there is that all we see in the West is the threat that the North poses, the nuclear weapons, the missiles, but that's not the whole picture," Bonner said. "They may not be able to see everything in North Korea when they are there, but surely it's better to see something than nothing."
Scores of people die each year trying to cross the heavily-guarded border into the southImage: picture alliance/AP Photo
That assessment is shared by Stuart Leighton, owner of Taedong Travel, who has recently been granted permission to take the first group of foreign tourists to Pyongyang for Christmas.
"My belief is that more tourists should go to North Korea," said Leighton, who is also based in Beijing. "It gives the people there the chance to meet outsiders and to see that we are not evil, that we are in fact very similar.
"And that works both ways; visitors will see that it's not the most dangerous place in the world," he added. "We need to break down the barriers over time, not build new ones."
Defending the decision to go
Catherine Cellier-Smart visited Pyongyang in August 2010 out of a desire to see if all that she had heard and read about the country while living in South Korea was accurate.
"What mainly struck me was to realize that the life in this country - a nation which is often not taken very seriously by the outside world - is a hard reality for the local population," she said. "I was only there for three days, and I could leave afterwards, but 20 million people can't leave.
"I realized that North Korea would like reunification as much as South Korea - except that the DPRK wants reunification on its own terms, of course."
But she defends her decision to go.
All most people know about North Korea is what its propaganda machine tells usImage: picture alliance/AP Photo
"Anybody who buys any Chinese- or Korean-made product can be unwittingly supporting the North Korean regime," she points out. "Some clothes are made in North Korea and then shipped across the border and labeled 'Made in China.' Some South Korean products are - partly - made at the Kaesong industrial complex by North Korean workers whose monthly $50 salaries are paid to them by the DPRK government from money paid by rich South Korean conglomerates.
"How do you decide ethically which countries to visit and not to visit?" she asks. "Where do you draw the line? You don't visit India because it has nuclear weapons? Or the USA because it has the death penalty? Or Norway because it continues whaling?"
Ken Kato is not convinced by the arguments and believes tourists are more keen on impressing their friends with tales from a country that is famously difficult to visit and that travel firms are more interested in turning a profit.
"It's just one more way for the North Korean government to get hold of hard currency to build more weapons and repress more of its people," he said. "It's wrong."
North Korea in pictures: a rare glimpse into the isolated country
A team of journalists explored North Korea for a week, accompanied by officials who monitored the images and ensured not a single citizen was interviewed. The secluded country opened up and revealed itself.
The reporters from AP covered over 2,150 kilometers (1,336 miles), in a country of barely 25,000 kilometers of roads, merely 724 of those paved. They came back with only their photos as evidence of the life in the northern part of the secluded country. In the picture: A woman walks along a road southeast of Pyongyang in North Korea's North Hwanghae province.
A North Korean man sits by a cooking fire he built to roast potatoes and chicken in the town of Samjiyon, in Ryanggang province. Possibly more than any other populated place on earth, North Korea is terra incognita, but the AP team was granted access to see North Korea and travel through places that, they were told, no foreign journalist and few foreigners had been allowed to see before.
A boulder lies on a path near the peak of Mount Paektu in North Korea's Ryanggang province. North Koreans venerate Mount Paektu for its natural beauty, but more importantly because it is considered the home of the North Korean revolution. They also consider the mountain sacred as the place of their ancestral origin.
Farmers walk in a rainstorm with their cattle near the town of Hyesan, North Korea in Ryanggang province. "To get out of Pyongyang, we weaved our way around buses, streetcars, the black sedans of party officials and fleets of colorful new taxis that have over the past few years become commonplace," says Eric Talmadge, one of the jourmalists who participated in the journey.
Young North Korean schoolchildren help to fix pot holes in a rural road in North Korea's North Hamgyong province. The country's best road is the 200-kilometer stretch of highway connecting the capital to the east coast port city of Wonsan. Beyond Wonsan, potholes, cracks or sudden patches of dirt road make travel a bumpy experience.
North Korean residents walk on along a river in the town of Kimchaek, in North Korea's North Hamgyong province. The once-productive cities along its east coast, like the coal mining town of Kilju and the nearby city of Kimchaek - built around a sprawling but now eerily quiet ironworks complex - have become a rust belt, gritty and relentlessly gray.
The remains of lunch left on a restaurant table in the city of Wonsan, North Korea. The government "minders" accompanied the journalists throughout the entire trip. Like foreign tourists, the AP team only saw a bare trace of the deprivation residents experience. Most of the country's citizens cannot afford proper housing, let alone a visit to a restaurant.
The journalists' itineary was dictated by North Korea's terms. There would be no stopping to interview random people. "It's quite possible none of them had ever seen an American before," said AP's Eric Talmadge, "but our presence went unacknowledged. No glances were exchanged. No words were spoken." Here boys are playing soccer in the town of Hyesan, in the northern Ryanggang province.
North Korean men share a picnic lunch and North Korean-brewed and bottled Taedonggang beer along the road in North Korea's North Hwanghae province. This year, according to United Nations experts, the country could come closer to feeding itself than it has in decades. But hunger remains a serious problem, with a third of North Korean children stunted in growth due to poor nutrition.
A farmer carries a fully grown cabbage after harvesting it from the main crop which will be harvested early November, on the outskirts of Pyongyang. About four-fifths of North Korea's land is too rugged to farm. Providing enough food to feed the nation is a struggle for North Korea, which suffered a near cataclysmic famine in the 1990s.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/Wong Maye-E
No detour allowed
A man works on his car as others sit next to the Wonsan Sea in North Korea. For the most part, AP's reporters were not allowed to detour from their pre-approved route, which, to no one's surprise, did not include nuclear facilities or prison camps.
A group of young North Koreans enjoys a picnic on the beach in Wonsan. "Even on the loneliest of lonely highways, we would never be without a 'minder,' whose job was to monitor and supervise our activities," Talmadge explains. "We were not to take photographs of any checkpoints or military installations."
North Korean people rest next to the railroad tracks in a town in North Korea's North Hamgyong province. "Though we would not get to know the people along the way, the country itself had a great deal to say. And it was opening up before us," Talmadge said upon his return. "We had been granted unprecedented access."
