IT’S the showpiece beach resort at the heart of Kim Jong-un’s plans for a holiday empire – but the “North Korean Benidorm” hides a dark secret.
The Wonsan-Kalma resort reportedly got its nickname after dictator Kim sent a fact-finding mission to Spain’s Costa Blanca in 2017.
But unlike its Mediterranean rival, Wonsan-Kalma has a history filled with forced labour, human rights abuses – and poo.
The horrors began right at the start of the project, when the regime press-ganged teenage schoolkids into “shock brigades” of builders.
Pyongyang propaganda bragged that these youths were building the resort’s hotels at the rate of a storey per day in a December 2019 report.
However, by that time, two deadlines to complete the project had already been missed. With a third approaching, workers were pushed to labor almost continuously in freezing conditions.
Party leaders deployed workers “amidst the harsh cold of January through March, allowing them only three hours of rest per day,” a source revealed to the Daily NK newspaper.
And though the regime called the youths “volunteers”, really they had no real choice.
Individuals are coerced into “shock brigades” with the risk of arrest and imprisonment in labor camps, as stated in a UN report regarding forced labor in North Korea.
According to the report, recruits earn a monthly salary “barely sufficient to purchase two packs of cigarettes” and receive such minimal food that malnutrition is common.
Workers at Wonsan lived off “foul-smelling seaweed soup, salted radishes and yellow corn rice,” according to Daily NK.
Female workers faced an added peril.
One woman quoted by the UN recalled how shock brigade chiefs “harassed” them and said “many women were sexually abused”.
North Korea expert Michael Madden described the backbreaking toil faced by “volunteers” at Wonsan.
He said: “Youth Shock Brigades would be involved in digging foundations, framing, painting, paving, and moving materials and supplies.
“Pay for brigade members is minimal.
“In the past, the brigade members were not provided adequate food supplies and stole from local populations.”
Today the resort welcomes Russian visitors and members of the North Korean elite.
But guests may be surprised to learn that they’re not the first to stay in the brand-new hotels.
When the third deadline for finishing the resort passed in April 2020, the site lay almost abandoned for months as Covid-19 spread around the world.
Soon reports emerged that homeless wanderers – known as kkotjebi in North Korea – had moved in to the skeletal hotels.
“The buildings are no different from toilets, with bowel movements left behind by the kkotjebi everywhere,” a source told Daily NK.
“Now they’re full of human waste and soot from fires.”
The same report also revealed that the resort’s planning chief and site manager had been sacked in 2019 amid mounting delays.
It’s a punishment with potentially fatal consequences.
Mr. Madden, the creator of North Korea Leadership Watch and a Stimson Center fellow in Washington DC, noted that neither individual has been heard from since.
If they were held accountable for inefficiencies or poor performance, he surmised, they likely faced demotion, rigorous indoctrination, and reassignment to manual labor roles.
“On the other hand if there was malfeasance or some type of corruption, then both of these people have, at the least, faced a lengthy incarceration,” he continued.
“If these individuals had a habit of corrupt activities on Wonsan-Kalma and any previous projects, then one or both project managers faced the firing squad.”
Before it was a holiday destination, Wonsan was a missile launch site.
Indeed the rockets continued blasting off even as the hotels took shape.
And ultimately, that’s how money spent by tourists will be used.
Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, warned holidaymakers not to fund Kim’s “tools of death”.
He said: “The money coming from tourists, mostly Russians at the moment, will go to the areas that the regime regards as critical to its survival.
“These are: keeping the Kim family rich, and the key elites happy, as well as developing nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and other tools of death.”
The North Korean tourism push, which seeks to raise foreign currency, has also seen the regime open the Masikryong Ski Resort, and Yangdok hot springs resort.
