North Korea welcomes Russian tourists, likely first to visit the isolated country since the pandemic
Seoul, Feb 9: A group of Russian tourists headed to North Korea from Vladivostok airport in Russia's Far East on Friday, likely the first foreign travellers from any country to enter the isolated state since the pandemic.
The tour underscores deepening cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang, following a meeting last September between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin at a cosmodrome in Russia's Far East.
Many Russians now struggle to travel to Europe and the United States because of sanctions applied to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. In October, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said he would recommend North Korea as a vacation destination.
South Korea's government said it has no record of North Korean state media reporting on tourists entering the country since the pandemic.
The tour group will visit the capital Pyongyang and will then go skiing, Inna Mukhina, the general director of the Vostok Intur agency, which is running the tour, told The Associated Press. Vladivostok airport's online timetable shows an Air Koryo plane took off for Pyongyang at 1.39 pm local time Friday.
There are "lots" of people who wanted to come on the tour to North Korea, Mukhina, the tour operator, said, adding that the group contains travelers from places across Russia including Moscow and St Petersburg as well as the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, sandwiched in between Poland and Lithuania. The group also includes children who study skiing at a Russian school that aims to create Olympic champions, she said.
The Russians' reasons for visiting North Korea vary, Mukhina said, suggesting some people are interested in the opportunity to visit a closed country, while others are more interested in skiing and snowboarding.
"We love skiing," Galina Polevshchikova told the AP at Vladivostok airport shortly before getting on the flight to Pyongyang. "I really want to go there because it's probably the most closed place where you have the opportunity to do this," she said.
The group, is not a traditional tourist group, but "a test tour delegation" that could pave the way for other groups of Russian tourists, Mukhina said.
The trip, scheduled for February, was a surprise to Asia observers, who had expected the first post-pandemic tourists to North Korea to come from China, the North's biggest diplomatic ally and economic pipeline.
According to a Tass report published in January, the group of tourists will visit monuments in Pyongyang such as the "Tower of Juche Idea," named after the North's guiding philosophy of "juche" or self-reliance. The tourists will then travel on to the North's Masik Pass on the east coast, where the country's most modern ski resort is located, Tass said.
"In (Masik Pass), you will find yourself in a real paradise for winter sports lovers!" the Vostok Intur agency's website gushes. "Here you will find incredible slopes with different levels of difficulty that will satisfy the needs of both experienced skiers and beginners."
The package for the upcoming Russian tour costs 750 per person, according to Tass and the tour agency.
According to Vladivostok airport's flight timetable, the group is travelling on a Tupolev Tu-154 jet, a workhorse of Soviet aviation but has been involved in a number of crashes.
Tass reported that the trip was arranged under an agreement reached between Oleg Kozhemyako, governor of the Primorye region, and North Korean authorities.
Kozhemyako traveled to Pyongyang in December for talks on boosting economic ties as part of a flurry of bilateral exchanges since the Kim-Putin summit. Ahead of the trip, he told Russian media he expected to discuss tourism, agriculture and trade cooperation.
The expanding ties between North Korea and Russia come as they are eached locked in separate confrontations with the United States and its allies North Korea over its advancing nuclear program, and Russia over its protracted war with Ukraine.
The Kim-Putin summit deepened global suspicions that North Korea is supplying conventional arms to Russia for its war in Ukraine, in return for high-tech Russian weapons technologies and other support.
North Korea has been slowly easing pandemic-era curbs and opening its international borders as part of its efforts to revive its economy devastated by the lockdown and persistent US-led sanctions. In August, South Korea's spy service told lawmakers that North Korea's economy shrank each year from 2020 to 2022, and that its gross domestic product last year was 12% less than in 2016.
Chinese travellers accounted for about 90% of the foreign visitors to North Korea before the pandemic. In 2019, a record number of about 300,000 foreign tourists visited North Korea, resulting in North Korea earning between 90 million and 150 million, according to analysts' assessments.
Let the Truth be known. If you read VB and like VB, please be a VB Supporter and Help us deliver the Truth to one and all.
Bangladesh’s interim government bans deposed PM Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League
Dhaka/New Delhi, May 11 (PTI): Bangladesh’s interim government led by Muhammad Yunus on Saturday evening banned deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League under an anti-terrorism law.
The announcement to ban Hasina’s Awami League came after the student-led newly-floated National Citizen Party (NCP) activists rallied since Thursday and carried out blockades across Dhaka demanding the ban.
“The official gazette notification will be issued in this regard on the next working day,” Yunus’s office said, describing it as a “statement of the Council of Advisers” or the Cabinet.
The statement said the Council decided that the ban would remain effective until the completion of the “trial of the Awami League and its leaders in Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal in the interest of protecting the country’s security and sovereignty”.
It said the decision was also taken for the security of the leaders and activists of the July 2024 uprising that eventually led to the ousting of the Awami League regime alongside the complainants and witnesses of the trial in the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT).
The meeting chaired by Yunus simultaneously amended the ICT law allowing the tribunal to try any political party, its front organisations and affiliated bodies.
Hasina’s 16-year-long Awami League regime was toppled on August 5 last year in a student-led violent mass uprising prompting the 77-year-old former prime minister to flee to India.
Three days after her ouster, Yunus took charge as the chief adviser of the interim government.
Hasina and many of her party leaders have been facing 100s of cases, including that of mass murder and corruption, since then. Most of her party leaders and ministers in her government are either arrested or fled abroad.
A large part of Students against Discrimination (SAD), which led the last year’s movement that ousted Hasina, crystalised as the National Citizen Party (NCP) earlier this year.
Formed in 1949, the Awami League led the movement for the autonomy of Bengalis in the then East Pakistan for decades and eventually led the Liberation War in 1971.
The announcement to ban Awami League came as Bangladesh on Saturday witnessed an escalating tension as NCP supporters marched towards Yunus’s official residence to mount pressure for the ban.
Media reports suggested that the NCP activists were joined by several Islamist and right-wing groups while they were staging a sit-in in front of nearby Shahgabh area of the capital.
Yunus’s office in a statement on Friday said the government had established contacts with different political parties in the run up to taking a decision to ban Awami League.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which is Awami League’s main rival, has distanced itself from the demand saying they are opposed to a ban on any political party.
