Travis King crossing puts North Korea border tours under scrutiny
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[July 25, 2023]
By Soo-hyang Choi and Josh Smith
SEOUL (Reuters) - Tourists should expect far stricter supervision if
visits to the border between North and South Korea resume, analysts
said, after U.S. soldier Travis King used an organized tour to get close
enough to dash across to North Korea last week.
The U.S. Army private joined a tour party visiting the so-called truce
village of Panmunjom on July 18, a day after he was supposed to have
returned to the U.S. to face disciplinary action over charges brought
while serving in South Korea.
Dressed in civvies, King broke off from a group of 40 tourists being
guided around the Joint Security Area (JSA) inside the Demilitarized
Zone (DMZ), and sprinted across the border, landing Washington in more
diplomatic botheration with the nuclear-armed North.
The U.S.-led United Nations Command (UNC), which oversees the area, has
indefinitely suspended all JSA tours after King's unauthorized crossing.
On Monday, Lieutenant General Andrew Harrison, the command's deputy
commander, said when or how the tours would resume was yet to be
decided.
"I've never been involved in a military inquiry that hasn't come up with
a series of recommendations at the end, which may or may not change the
processes that were in place beforehand," he told reporters in Seoul.
Going to the DMZ separating the two Koreas, which remain technically at
war, is a popular trip for tourists looking to get a glimpse of the
reclusive authoritarian state. Not all DMZ tours stop at the JSA, which
is the only spot where visitors can step up to and even briefly over the
border into the North.
For tour agencies, the JSA tour is one of the packages that sell with
the highest margin in South Korea with "absolutely no cost involved to
the tour companies, except for the bus and the driver," said Jacco
Zwetsloot, a former JSA tour guide and now host of the NK News Podcast
about North Korea.
Visiting JSA is free of charge for South Korean nationals, but the tour
King was on started at $180, according to a Tripadvisor listing.
For the UNC, the tours are about educating people and raising awareness
of the "frozen conflict" after the Korean War ended in a truce, not a
peace treaty, Zwetsloot said.
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U.S. Private Travis T. King (wearing a
black shirt and black cap) is seen in this picture taken during a
tour of the tightly controlled Joint Security Area (JSA) on the
border between the two Koreas, at the truce village of Panmunjom,
South Korea, July 18, 2023. Sarah Leslie/Handout via REUTERS/File
Photo
Zwetsloot predicted changes could include making the tours even
smaller, to as few as 10 people per group, or keeping groups behind
glass or back away from the border where troops from both sides
stand almost face to face.
"I expect that within a year, we'll see a redesigned orientation
visit become possible once again, but it probably won't be as free
and easy as they have been for the last 40 or so years," he said,
noting that security should be the main consideration.
Lim Eul-chul, a professor of North Korean studies at Kyungnam
University, said authorities should focus on how to better control
tour groups while keeping the area open to the public.
"Banning access would only result in people losing sight of this
grave reality that the Korean peninsula is facing," Lim said.
Despite its name, the DMZ, established after the 1950-53 war, is
highly fortified with razor wire and minefields on either side of a
4-kilometre (2.5 miles) wide buffer.
"It can never simply be a tourist destination, primarily because of
the huge amounts of ordnance that still exist across the
demilitarized zone since the end of the war," Harrison said.
"It's a constant balance between that value (of educating the
public) and the risk to the individuals who are in the Demilitarized
Zone."
King's case would be the first successful border crossing by a JSA
tourist ever, Zwetsloot said. In 2001 a German
doctor-turned-activist tried to cross in an effort to raise
awareness about human rights issues, but was stopped by guards in
the South.
(Reporting by Soo-hyang Choi and Josh Smith; Editing by Simon
Cameron-Moore)
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