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Link SCENES FROM INSIDE NORTH KOREA. The Ryugyong hotel in Pyongyang was intended to be the world's largest hotel, but it is yet to host a single guest. Photo: iStock

A North Korean traffic police woman stands in front of Workers' Party flags decorating the streets in Pyongyang. Photo: AP

North Koreans ride on an electric trolley bus in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: AP

A North Korean man rides in a subway car on in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: Wong Maye-E

The ruling Workers' Party symbols are erected by the portraits of the late North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung, left, and Kim Jong Il while workers decorate the vicinity with flowers at the Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: AP

North Korean women wearing traditional dresses gather for rehearsals in Pyongyang, North Korea in preparation for the 70th anniversary of the founding of their country's ruling party in October 2015. Photo: AP

Pyongyang Marathon part of a new North Korea trip offered by Intrepid Travel. Photo: Intrepid Travel

Future Scientist Street in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: Tom Beadle

Dancing with the locals in North Korea. Photo: Tom Beadle

Doing their duty: North Korean women carrying decorative flowers walk from the Kim Il Sung Square after rehearsing for a parade. Photo: AP

A propaganda poster in North Korea. Photo: Tom Beadle

A waitress works behind the counter at the Kumrung cafe where the menu includes the usual favourites of customers in the West. Pyongyang may be one of the few major cities left on Earth where you can't find a Starbucks, but it's brimming over with coffee shops. Photo: AP

Coffee and coffee art at the Kumrang cafe in Pyongyang. Photo: AP

The coffee and drinks menu at a coffee shop in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: AP

Bronze statues of late leaders Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung, at Mansu Hill in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: Tom Beadle

North Korean school girls holding brooms bow to pay their respects toward a mural which shows the late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung delivering a speech, before sweeping the area surrounding this mural in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: Wong Maye-E/AP

Dawn breaks over Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: Wong Maye-E/AP

Members of North Korea's Moranbong band sing and dance during a joint performance with the State Merited Chorus in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP

Tourists pose in front of model missiles, including a North Korean Scud-B, at the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul. North Korea's long-range rocket launch is considered by the West to form part of its efforts to develop intercontinental ballistic missile technologies. Photo: Han Myung-Gu

Dusk settles over Pyongyang, North Korea, as the 105-story pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel towers over residential apartments. The hotel has been under construction since 1987 and was intended to be a landmark and a symbol of progress and prosperity, but the economic difficulties that the country went through forced the project into repeated delays and nearly 30-years later, it has become a major Pyongyang landmark but has never been used as a hotel, as it was intended. Photo: AP

North Korean soldiers guard the truce village of Panmunjom at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) which separates the two Koreas, in Panmunjom, North Korea. Photo: AP

North Koreans walk on a bridge that takes them over the Pothong River in Pyongyang, North Korea. The Pothong River is the second largest river that runs through the North Korean capital. Photo: AP

North Koreans bow on Mansu Hill, where bronze statues of late leaders Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung, in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: AP

North Koreans watch from the Kim Il Sung Square as fireworks explode over the Juche Tower during celebrations of the "Day of the Shining Star" or birthday anniversary of late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in February 2016, in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: AP

North Korean soldiers parade through Kim Il Sung Square with their missiles and rockets as jets fly in formation during a mass military parade in October 2015, in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: Wong Maye-E/AP

A North Korean man carries his shovel where he was clearing snow from along a main road, as he walks past farm fields covered in snow in Pyongwon county, South Pyongan, North Korea. Photo: Wong Maye-E/AP

North Koreans perform with scarves below the North Korean flag. Photo: AP/File

North Koreans cycle past a planetarium at the Three Revolutions Exhibition Hall in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photo: AP

Crowds bow to the statues of North Korea's late leader Kim Jong Il, right, and his father, North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung, which tower over the capital Pyongyang on a hill, North Korea. Photo: AP

North Koreans parade with the North Korean flag in Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang, North Korea, in February 2016, to show their loyalty to the Workers' Party. Photo: AP

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The death of Otto Warmbier on Monday, only six days after being released by North Korea, is a tragedy in more ways than one. In January 2016, Warmbier, then a 21-year-old American college student, was arrested in Pyongyang for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster, for which he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. Upon his release, it was revealed that he had been in a coma for more than a year.

So what happened to Warmbier? North Korean authorities said that he had contracted botulism shortly after his trial in March 2016 and been given a sleeping pill from which he never woke up. Many disbelieve the official report and think that he might have been tortured and murdered.

See Also North Korea travel guide

In reality, we will never know the particulars. What I do know is that there is a dire lack of medical resources in North Korea, even for elites and foreigners. In 2011, I lived undercover for six months in Pyongyang, at a university teaching 20-year-old sons of North Korea's elite. While I was there, an American teacher fell while hiking on a minder-led tour and was rushed to a foreigners-only hospital; doctors stitched his head with no anesthetics and gave him no antibiotics. The teacher returned to the United States, developed an infection and had to undergo emergency surgery.

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North Korea is one of the poorest countries in the world, but its regime is also one of the world's most brutal. It seems strange that Americans are shocked by the cruelty in Warmbier's case when North Korea is repeatedly singled out for its crimes against humanity, which, according to the United Nations, have "no parallel in any other country in the contemporary world." Perhaps the lack of this awareness explains why Americans also seem to believe that foreigners on a temporary visit to North Korea are immune to the travesty that exists there. Warmbier's case is a stark reminder of North Korea's complete disregard for human life.

Each year, about 5000 Western tourists visit North Korea, of whom roughly a fifth are Americans. The United States is considering banning its citizens from going to North Korea as tourists, and the company that organised the tour for Warmbier's trip has now halted serving Americans.

Tourism into North Korea is a troubling concept. While proponents argue that it could open doors for the isolated citizens of North Korea, it is doubtful how many average North Koreans do indeed get exposed to such initiatives, since the visitors in Pyongyang only get shown a few designated propaganda sites and are allowed to interact only with their minders. Although the tours are mostly safe, due to the fact that it is a virtual police state where everything is controlled by the regime, the real danger there is hidden and unpredictable. At any given moment, depending on the political climate, a foreigner could be intercepted by authorities and essentially used for ransom, which could cause a diplomatic nightmare in a complex geopolitical relationship involving China, Russia, the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Most of all, the real question on tourism to North Korea is an ethical one. Tourism is for individual enjoyment and generally a hobby for the privileged citizens of first-world nations. So what is there to enjoy in a gulag nation where 25 million citizens are held captive? Casually touring North Korea is akin to hiking at Auschwitz under the Nazis. The propaganda posters, one of which Warmbier had supposedly been trying to steal, might look souvenir-worthy to those who are naive to their political contexts, but they are also the tools, like a swastika, with which the Great Leader regime enslaves its people. When I look at them, I see the blood of the Korean people who perished for generations and will continue to perish.

Besides, there is another dark side to such tourism. Those visitors bring in about $US43.6 million per year for the North Korean regime, which would use that to oppress its own people and strengthen its military and nuclear resources.

If such is not the very definition of "torture porn," then what is?


The horror of the Warmbier case is not only about the inhumane treatment of an American by the North Korean regime but also about the political posturing of all of the nations involved. Trump immediately praised his administration by saying "at least we got him home," blaming the Obama administration for failing to bring the captive out earlier. In actuality, nobody brought Warmbier home. North Korea held him, despite his unconscious condition, until a politically opportune moment and released him on "humanitarian" grounds to avoid the diplomatic fallout of an American citizen dying within its borders. (Currently three other Americans are being detained in North Korea.)

Their tactic worked, since immediately after Warmbier's death, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is to travel to Washington next week for a meeting with Trump, used the occasion to declare that he hopes to meet with Kim Jong-un before the end of the year, although such a plan is nothing new but an expected advance of his policy of engagement with North Korea. Predictably Moon did little to elaborate on the predicament of his own citizens, at least six of whom are being detained in North Korea, never mind mentioning the 500 South Korean fishermen who have been abducted to the North since the war and are considered missing.

What Warmbier's death reminds us of is the utter failure of diplomacy with North Korea, and that detaining an American citizen, for North Korea, works to its benefit. Warmbier was a young college student unaware of the depth of the danger he had unwittingly stepped into. Isn't it then the job of his country to prevent future Warmbiers?

Kim is author of "Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite."

The Washington Post

See also: What it's really like to travel in North Korea

See also: 'Life-changing' - Melbourne man now a North Korea tour guide