South unwilling to resume Mt. Geumgang tour

By Yi Whan-woo

The government is apparently reluctant to reopen tours to North Korea’s Mount Geumgang resort despite repeated demands from Pyongyang for them to be resumed, according to analysts, Monday.

They claimed that a senior government official recently cited the U.N sanctions against the repressive state as a “mere excuse” to prolong Seoul’s ban on allowing citizens to travel to the scenic mountain resort located across the border.

“I’d say that South Korea is interpreting the U.N. sanctions against the North for its own interests,” said Paik Hak-soon, a senior researcher at the Sejong Institute. “The government claims transparency on the issue of restarting the tours to Mount Geumgang, but if that’s the case, the inter-Korean industrial park in Gaeseong, North Korea also should matter.”

The joint tour program was a major source of currency for the cash-strapped North until it was suspended in 2008 after a South Korean tourist was shot dead. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior government official said last week that the question remains as to whether resuming the inter-Korean tour program would violate a series of U.N. economic sanctions.

These measures are aimed at preventing bulk cash from overseas being siphoned into the military regime’s development of weapons of mass destructions (WMDs).

The official added that there is a consensus between South Korea and the U.N. that Seoul’s annual investment of over $100 million on the Gaeseong Industrial Complex (GIC) in North Korea is “not related to the WMDs.”

“If the financial transactions at the GIC can be so transparent to win trust of the U.N., the government should be able to find the same way to convince the world regarding the suspended tour program,” a professor at Korea National Diplomatic Academy (KNDA) said, on condition of anonymity.

“The government argues that the country’s investment on the GIC only benefits North Korean laborers hired by South Korean enterprises, not the Pyongyang regime.

“I fully believe that the same can be applied regarding the tour program to Mount Geumgang. And the government is not doing its job,” the KNDA professor added.

Meanwhile, the government has taken a dubious approach when carrying out the U.N. sanctions on its steps to implement the Eurasia initiative, which inevitably requires cooperation from Pyongyang.

Under a three-way logistics project involving Pyongyang and Moscow, Seoul has purchased bituminous coal produced from Siberia which is shipped through the Russian border town of Khasan and Rajin, a port city in North Korea.