North Korea opens up its mountain
Asia Times
11/9/2007
[excerpt]
North Korea said this week it will allow a South Korean business group to start sightseeing tours of a scenic mountain on its border with China next year, as agreed at a recent inter-Korean summit of leaders.
Pyongyang’s contract with the Hyundai Group will enable South Koreans to visit the 2,744-meter-high Mt Paektu by direct flight. Currently, South Koreans can only visit the Chinese side of the mountain.
“Both sides agreed to start the tour of noted places on Mt Paektu from May of 2008,” the (North) Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)said of the contract signed between Hyundai Group chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun and Choe Sung-chol, vice chairman of the Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, a North Korean state organization handling inter-Korean affairs.
Hyun, back from a five-day trip to North Korea, met reporters in Seoul and confirmed the contract. “Under the agreement, Hyundai Group will have exclusive rights to operate the tourism business to Mt Paektu for 50 years,” Hyun said, disclosing that she also met with the North’s top leader, Kim Jong-il, during her stay in the communist country.
The sightseeing tour of the tallest mountain on the Korean Peninsula expands Hyundai’s business with North Korea, which currently includes a cross-border tour of Mt Kumgang on the North’s east coast. More than 1 million South Koreans have visited the mountain since the tours started in 1998.
Most Koreans regard Mt Paektu as a holy area where their mythical leader, Tangun, descended from heaven and established a kingdom. North Korea claims that its current leader, Kim Jong-il, was also born there 65 years ago, an event heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens. (However, former Soviet Union records show he was born in Siberia, in 1941, where his father, Kim Il-sung, commanded the 1st Battalion of the Soviet 88th Brigade, made up of Chinese and Korean exiles.)
North Korea also claims that the mountain was a base for the independence movement against Japan’s colonial rule of Korea led by the communist nation’s founder, Kim Il-sung, in the early part of the 20th century.
Hyundai has been at the vanguard of business with North Korea since its founder, Chung Ju-yung, crossed the heavily armed demilitarized zone with truckloads of cattle in 1997. Hyundai’s business in North Korea also includes the Kaesong industrial complex, where about two dozen garment and other labor-intensive South Korean firms operate with the labor of more than 15,000 North Korean workers. The project started as a result of the first-ever inter-Korean summit in 2000.
Establishing tourism to Mt Paektu was a lifelong dream of Chung Ju-yung, who died in 2001. Chung handed over the group’s North Korean business arm to his fifth son, Mong-hun, who committed suicide in 2003 amid suspicions that the group was involved in the government’s secret transmittance of huge sums of money to Pyongyang in return for the 2000 summit. His wife, Hyun, immediately took charge of the business.
“My trip to the North was very productive,” Hyun said. “Details of the Mt Paektu business will be discussed at the working level.”
Speaking about her meeting with the North Korean leader, she said “I met him for the first time in two years. He asked about my daughter and we talked a lot about personal things.” Hyun said she is happy to realize her father-in-law’s dream.
In addition, the North’s Asia-Pacific Peace Committee decided to grant Hyundai Group the right to conduct tours of the Kaesong area. “Both sides agreed to start the tour of historic sites and scenic places in the Kaesong area from early December 2007,” the KCNA reported.
Meanwhile, the South Korean government, together with the Hyundai Group, plans to survey Mt Paektu this month to prepare for the start of tours next year, industry sources said. “The preliminary survey by government officials and Hyundai will thoroughly check Mt. Paektu,” said an official from Hyundai.
