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Cash Payments to N. Korea Are Not an Option
A Unification Ministry official said on Thursday paying cash to North Korea for package tours to Mt. Kumgang goes against UN Security Council Resolution 1874, which sanctions the North in response to its nuclear and missile tests. The South Korean and U.S. governments have said tours to Mt. Kumgang do not in themselves violate UN sanctions, and the official's comments only raise the problem of cash payments.

For some time, there have been calls from within the South Korean and U.S. governments that cash payments per head for the Mt. Kumgang tours should stop. President Lee Myung-bak said last July that there are suspicions that massive aid to North Korea over the last 10 years has been used to produce nuclear weapons. Until the tours were halted after the fatal shooting of a South Korean tourist by North Korean soldiers at the resort last July, 1.93 million people visited the resort and the tour operator Hyundai Asan paid around US$500 million in cash to North Korea.
That's a big chunk of change, the kind that lets Kimmie keep his military supplied well enough to prevent a coup. Perhaps instead of visiting Mt. Kumgang the South Koreans could visit the Grand Canyon, or at least Hawaii ...
The North Korean regime has seen the tours as a kind of ATM and there is a good chance that part of the money or all of it was used to produce nuclear weapons.

The government says it is instead considering the provision of much-needed necessities for North Koreans, such as food and medicine, or limiting the use of the money for economic development, making those payments to a limited-use bank account rather than to the North's Asia Pacific Peace Committee, which oversees the tourism business.

North Korea was outraged, saying Wednesday, "Nowhere in the world do tourists pay for their tours with goods" and said non-cash payments were "ludicrous." If South Korea pays for the tours by means other than cash or makes the transaction transparent, North Korea would find it difficult to use the money to develop nuclear weapons.

North Korea told Hyundai Asan chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun, who recently visited Pyongyang, that it would agree to resume the tours to Mt. Kumgang. But it still refuses talks with South Korean government officials, who have the authority to allow the visits to continue. Seoul must realize North Korea's motives in bypassing the government and communicating directly with Hyundai Asan in order to get cash, and make the North realize that this is not the way to handle things. There also needs to be a cast-iron guarantee that incidents like the fatal shooting of the South Korean tourist are not repeated and visitors to Mt. Kumgang are safe.
Posted by: Steve White 2009-11-30
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=284499