[The Korea
Tourism Organization said the latest torrent of North Korean threats has so far
had little effect on tourism, with the number of Chinese tourists doubling
during a vacation week last week, said Lee Kwang-soo, a spokesman. Still, it
was taking precautionary measures reaching out to foreign tourist agencies to
inform them that it was safe to visit South Korea, he said.]
By Choe Sang-Hun
The North’s warning followed a similar advisory last week
in which it told foreign embassies in Pyongyang to devise evacuation plans.
“The situation on the Korean Peninsula is inching close to
a thermonuclear war due to the evermore undisguised hostile actions of the
United States and the South Korean puppet warmongers,” the Korea Asia-Pacific
Peace Committee, a North Korean state agency, said in a statement on Tuesday.
“It does not want to see foreigners in South Korea fall victim to the war.”
In South Korea, where people have long grown used to a
North Korean bluster or learned to shut themselves off from a situation out of
their control, there was few if any signs of anxiety following the warning. The
U.S. Embassy in Seoul said that the State Department’s travel notice on South
Korea remained unchanged on Tuesday.
“Despite current political tensions with North Korea there
is no specific information to suggest there are imminent threats to U.S.
citizens or facilities in the Republic of Korea,” said the travel message,
which was last updated on Friday, using the official name of South Korea. “The
Embassy has not changed its security posture and we have not recommended that
U.S. citizens who reside in, or plan to visit, the Republic of Korea take
special security precautions at this time.”
The Korea Tourism Organization said the latest torrent of
North Korean threats has so far had little effect on tourism, with the number
of Chinese tourists doubling during a vacation week last week, said Lee
Kwang-soo, a spokesman. Still, it was taking precautionary measures reaching
out to foreign tourist agencies to inform them that it was safe to visit South
Korea, he said.
“This is not the first time North Korea acts like this,”
said Song Hyun-seok, an official at the South Korean office of the Philippine
Department of Tourism. Gloria Lee, a spokeswoman at Lotte Hotel, one of South
Korea’s biggest hotel chains, reported a 30 percent drop in Japanese guests
this year but assigned the problem not to North Korea but to the weakening
Japanese yen and fraying political ties between South Korea and Japan.
But DMZ Tour Corp., a company that specializes in taking
tourists to the heavily militarized border with North Korea to experience one
of the world’s last reminders of Cold War tensions, has seen its business
shrink in recent weeks.
“We have foreign tourists calling us to ask whether it’s
safe to go to the border,” Yoo Jae-sung, a company official, said, declining to
reveal how many tourists his company lost to the tensions. “Yesterday, a group
of Australian tourists had a vote among themselves after agreeing that if any
one of them was afraid to go to the border, they would cancel the trip. They
went.”
South Korean officials and analysts said North Korea was
extremely unlikely to start a war. Rather, they said, its warning was
psychological warfare aimed at heightening a sense of crisis to rattle
investors’ confidence in the South’s globalized economy and force Washington
and its allies to return to the negotiating table. In that vein, the North may
launch a medium-range missile this week, they said.
On Tuesday, President Park rebutted North Korea’s
escalating pressure tactics by vowing to break the pattern of rewarding North
Korea for its bad behavior with compromises and economic assistance.
“How long are we going to repeat this vicious cycle where the
North Koreans create tensions and we give them compromises and aid?” she told a
Cabinet meeting called a day after the North pulled out all its 54,000 workers
from the Kaesong industrial park jointly run with the South.
The North Korean withdrawal of workers from Kaesong on
Monday effectively shuttered the last remaining example of inter-Korean
cooperation, one that had survived for eight years despite military tensions on
the divided Korean Peninsula. North Korea said the Kaesong Industrial Complex,
located in the North Korean town of the same name, can reopen only when the
South changed its “attitude.”
“North Korea must stop its wrong behavior and make a right
choice for the future of the Korean nation,” Ms. Park said, accusing the North
of flouting inter-Korean agreements to protect investments. “If the North
breaks international norms and promises like this, which country and which
business will invest in the North?”
Since it produced its first products in late 2004, the
Kaesong factory park, located just north of the western edge of the
inter-Korean border, has shown how the two Koreas could use economic
cooperation to overcome decades of political hostilities, signaling hope for an
eventual reunification. The two Koreas breached their heavily armed border,
clearing mine fields and pushing back military encampments, to build a
cross-border road and rail line that linked Kaesong and Seoul. Since then,
hundreds of South Koreans and trucks had rumbled through a border crossing each
day, shipping out textiles and other labor-intensive goods from 123 South
Korean factories in Kaesong made with low-cost North Korean labor.
North Korea said it was forced to consider shutting down
Kaesong because of tensions heightened by routine U.S.-South Korean joint
military exercises and the United Nations sanctions imposed for its Feb. 12
nuclear test.
Analysts and officials here agreed that the young and
relatively inexperienced North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, was exploiting the
current situation to boost his standing with the military, divert attention
from domestic economic failures and make the outside world used to his
country’s status as a nuclear weapons state.
North Korea’s ceaseless efforts to ratchet up tensions
magnified the challenge faced by the new South Korean leader.
Ms. Park, South Korea’s first female president, who has
called the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher her role model,
campaigned for her December election with a North Korea policy dubbed
“trustpolitik.”
In its essence, it copies Washington’s “strategic patience”
approach: if the North wins the trust of Seoul and Washington — by
de-escalating tensions and expressing a seriousness to negotiate away its
nuclear weapons — it will get the dialogue, respect and economic assistance it
desperately needs, but its provocations will be met only with more sanctions
and isolation.
As part of a trust-building process, she has offered to
de-link humanitarian aid from political tensions. Her approach was seen as more
flexible than her predecessor and fellow conservative, Lee Myung-bak. But it
fell far short of the North Korean demand for the lifting of the trade embargo
South Korea had imposed in 2010 when it blamed the North for the sinking of a
South Korean navy ship that killed 46 sailors. The North denied responsibility.
Ms. Park faces a delicate political balancing act in South
Korea, where voters remain angry over the North’s recent provocations,
including its artillery attack on a South Korean island in 2010, but also have
grown weary of a prolonged political deadlock between the two Koreas under Mr.
Lee.
On Tuesday, Ms. Park’s spokesman, Yoon Chang-jung, denied
local media reports that the government has drawn up plans to shut down
Kaesong.
“Our position remains unchanged that the Kaesong complex
should remain in operation,” he said.