North Korea blew up an entire tourist resort that once symbolized peace and cooperation with South Korea. This is the Diamond Mountain Golf Resort, located on Mount Gumgang.
The Tourism Region, a Special Administrative Region of North Korea, was established in 2002 to accommodate South Korean holidaymakers. This was the hallmark of South Korea's “solar policy” of dealing with North Korea – a foreign policy framework that was supposed to strengthen cooperation between the two countries through economic interaction.
South Koreans have been visiting the region for several years, supplying foreign exchange to the North Korean economy. However, tourism came to a halt in 2008 after an incident in which a female tourist was shot dead by a North Korean soldier. Then a 53-year-old South Korean woman entered the restricted area.
After the emergency, at the initiative of the South Korean government, tours to the resort were suspended. The ban continued for 10 years. In 2019, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited the tourist region and criticized it as “backward”, “messy” and “shabby”, according to Australia's ABC News. Media reported that he had instructed departments to redesign the facilities in accordance with North Korea's “aesthetic taste”. For the last couple of years, there have been no details about the fate of the resort.
And now the allegorical object of peace and hope was no longer needed. According to The Times, North Korea used explosives to demolish a golf resort that was built by South Korea for South Koreans and once symbolized reconciliation between the two countries. As shown by satellite images, tourist facilities were blown up over the weekend. And a month earlier, local media reported, the Haegumgang floating hotel, owned by the South Korean company Hyundai Group, was demolished on the same mountain.
South Korean government officials tried to use an intergovernmental hotline to demand an explanation for the destruction of tourist facilities in mountainous region, but they received no response. “North Korea's unilateral act to dismantle the hotel clearly runs counter to the goal of a cooperative inter-Korean effort based on mutual respect and consultation,” a spokesman for South Korea's unification ministry told The Times. Cha Deok Chol.
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