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IHT published yesterday following article:

The lure of Korea's magic mountain

Visiting this fabled North Korean mountain was not an easy decision for Kim Chung Soo and his wife, Nam Sang Ja. Twenty-two people from their village in central South Korea had each paid 240,000 won a month in advance to book a day trip last week, but after North Korea conducted a nuclear test on Oct. 9, 14 of the tourists canceled.

"Our children said, 'Father, don't go there. It's dangerous,'" Kim, 66, said with a laugh. Around the couple, a chattering crowd of visitors marveled and digital cameras flashed at the mountain's famed Nine Dragons Waterfall, which an ancient poet described as "10,000 bushels of pearls cascading from the heavens."

"This is not a place you can come everyday," Kim said. "So my wife and I thought, Let's go. Why does a Korean have to be afraid of visiting a Korean mountain?"

Each week, despite tensions over North Korea's nuclear test and U.S. assertions that such tours are channeling precious cash to the communist regime, thousands of South Koreans travel to this tourist resort carved out of the foothills of Mount Kumgang, just beyond the east coast border of the two Koreas.

The 3,280-hectare, or 8,200-acre, zone is the only part of the North that South Koreans can visit freely. The trip is not only a sojourn into a mountain whose waterfalls and autumn foliage have inspired Korean poets and painters for centuries. It offers a peek into a country stuck in a bygone era, where red-and- white slogans everywhere exhort people to "Defend Great General Kim Jong Il, Lodestar of the 21st Century, with our lives," while his hungry people brace themselves for UN sanctions.

For Kim Jong Il, the mountain has proved as precious as its namesake - Kumgang means diamond in Korean - bringing $452 million in tourist fees since the tours began in 1998. His regime also received a lump sum of $450 million from Hyundai, the South Korean conglomerate, for the rights to Mount Kumgang tourism and other inter-Korean economic projects, as well as $400 million invested in hotels, piers and roads in the mountain resort.

Now with Washington determined to cut off all sources of financing for the North's weapons programs, the tour has become a focal point in a U.S.- South Korean dispute over how to change the North's behavior. In Seoul last week, Christopher Hill, the U.S. assistant secretary of state, said the tours were "designed to give money to the North Korean authorities."

Seoul, however, is keeping the tours going. Tourism - and the incentives it provides - is one of the few remaining tools of influence that South Korea maintains over the North. It also is a linchpin in South Korea's painstakingly built policy of encouraging the North to open up to the outside world - the so- called Sunshine Policy.

"We started our tours hoping that we could help build trust and ease tensions between the two Koreas and serve as a catalyst for reunification," said Chang Hwan Bin, senior vice president of Hyundai-Asian, an arm of the Hyundai conglomerate that runs the tour. "But this winter is going to become a very difficult time for us."

Since 1998, Hyundai has attracted 1.36 million visitors. It pays from $30 to $80 to the North for each tourist it brings. After years of losses, the tour business posted its first annual profit last year, at 14 billion won, or $15 million, thanks partly to South Korean government subsidies for students and teachers who take the tour during the winter vacation.

But after the North's launching of missiles in July and its nuclear test, thousands of people canceled their trips. Now the average number of tourists stands at 20,000 a month, half the figure the company had hoped for and barely enough to break even. Then came another blow last week: Under pressure at home and abroad to implement UN sanctions more vigorously, Seoul said it would probably end the subsidies.

There is a growing recognition in South Korea that the Sunshine Policy "has not worked and it's time to recalibrate that policy," said Peter Beck, an analyst with the International Crisis Group in Seoul. But South Korea also fears that terminating the Mount Kumgang project will drive the North deeper into isolation and raise tensions.

"At this rate of 20,000 tourists a month, we pay about $1 million a month to the North in tourist fees," Chang said. "But keeping the door open with the North is worth the money. It took us 50 years to come this far. If we shut the door now, it will be more difficult to open it again."

To get to Mount Kumgang, tourists travel on a Hyundai-built road across the no-man's land that has divided the two Koreas for six decades, and enter a zone sealed off from the rest of North Korea by steel fences and soldiers.

They check into Hyundai-run hotels, bask in a hot spring, watch a North Korean acrobatic show and shop at duty-free Hyundai stores packed with Western liquor and North Korean "Paradise" cigarettes and dried mushrooms.

In the hotel's karaoke bar served by communist women(*), southern capitalists belt out American pop songs and Western whiskey flows.

Improved lifestyles in this part of North Korea highlight how contact with capitalists has already reaped rewards - or at least how much the regime is trying to polish its image for visitors. Villagers' clothes were more colorful than before. Some houses were freshly painted.

A few years ago, when Northern villagers on the road saw a convoy of South Korean tourist buses, they would drop their bags and hide behind trees to avoid contact. Now they go about their lives hardly noticing the buses.

"It would be really regrettable if the South succumbs to U.S. pressure and ends the tour," said Park Myong Nam, a North Korean tourism official.

A highlight of the trip is a hike up the mountain's Nine Dragons Valley. The route is dotted with granite monuments celebrating each spot where Kim Jong Il's late father, President Kim Il Sung, stopped for a rest during his "historic" hike in 1947.

Communist minders - part tour guides, part propagandists - guard the monuments. They are eager to propagate the official line on why North Korea was pursuing a nuclear arsenal, and to gather information from this rare contact with free-speaking South Koreans.

On a visit last week, the minders asked what had resulted from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's trip to Asia last week to try to work out how to implement UN sanctions against the North. South Korean tourists gathered to watch them speak.

"We are not afraid of sanctions," said Kim Nam Sook, a minder in her 20s. "We have lived with them for decades and survived them. They are nothing new to us."

Up the valley, Kim Keum Chul, who wore a Mao-style "people's suit," told South Koreans "not to worry about the nuclear test but to thank the North for building a strong deterrent against war on the Korean Peninsula."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/30/news/mount.php

(*) since when the North Koreans have something to do with COMMUNISM???