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The US Army private joined a touring party that visited the so-called truce village of Panmunjom on July 18, the day after he returned to the United States to face disciplinary action over charges brought against him while serving in South Korea.
Dressed in civilian clothes, King cut off from a group of 40 tourists who were directed around the Joint Security Area (JSA) inside Demilitarized zone (DMZ), and rushed across the border, plunging Washington into more diplomatic trouble with the nuclear-armed North.
The US-led United Nations Command, which oversees the area, has indefinitely suspended all South Sudanese army tours after King’s unauthorized crossing. Lieutenant General Andrew Harrison, the command’s deputy commander, said on Monday that it had not yet been decided when or how the tours would resume.
“I’ve never been involved in a military investigation that didn’t come up with a series of recommendations at the end, which may or may not change the pre-existing operations,” he told reporters in Seoul.
Going to the Demilitarized Zone that separates the two Koreas, which are still technically at war, is a popular excursion for tourists looking to get a glimpse of the reclusive, authoritarian country. Not all DMZ tours stop at the JSA, which is the only place where visitors can board and even briefly cross the border to the north.
For travel agencies, the JSA tour is one of the highest-margin selling packages in South Korea with “no cost at all to tour operators, except for the bus and driver,” Jaco says. Zoeteslota former JSA tour guide and now host of the NK News Podcast about North Korea.
Visiting the JSA is free for South Korean citizens, but the King tour starts at $180, according to the Tripadvisor listing.
For the UNC, Zwetsloot said, the tours are about educating people and raising awareness of the “frozen conflict” after the Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
Changes expected in Zwetsloot could include making tours smaller, to as little as 10 people per group, keeping groups behind glass or rolling back borders where troops from both sides stand almost face to face.
“I expect that within a year, we will see a redesigned orientation visit become possible again, but it probably won’t be as free and easy as it has been over the past 40 years or so,” he said, noting that security should be the main consideration.
Lim Yeol-chul, a professor of North Korean studies at Kyungnam University, said authorities should focus on how to better control tourist groups while keeping the area open to the public.
“Banning access will only cause people to lose sight of this grave reality that the Korean peninsula faces,” Lim said.
Despite its name, the Demilitarized Zone, established after the 1950-53 war, is heavily fortified with barbed wire and minefields on either side of a 4-kilometre (2.5 mi) wide buffer zone.
“It can never be just a tourist destination, mainly because of the huge amounts of munitions still lying across the DMZ since the end of the war,” Harrison said.
“It’s a constant balance between that value (for educating the public) and the risks to the individuals who are in the DMZ.”
Zwetsloot said King’s case would be the first-ever successful border crossing by a JSA tourist. In 2001, a German doctor-turned-activist tried to cross over in an effort to raise awareness of 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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