What else is Kim Jong Un buying instead of food? A new airport.
The new airport, which is now in its final stages, is the latest of North Korea’s “speed campaigns,” mass mobilizations of labor shock brigades aimed at finishing top-priority projects in record time. Dressed in hard hats and brown or olive green uniforms, impressive swarms of workers toil under huge signs calling on them to carry out their tasks with “Korea Speed.” From some corners of the site, patriotic music blares from loudspeakers to provide further motivation. [….]
But, in search of a badly needed source of foreign currency, North Korean officials have embarked on an ambitious campaign to significantly boost the country’s appeal to international tourists in the years ahead, which has made building a more impressive airport facility a top item on the government’s to-do list. [AP, Eric Talmadge]
Talmadge’s report then goes on to say that Pyongyang is building the new airport to gain “badly needed foreign currency.” It must not have occurred to Talmadge that if Pyongyang were really so short of foreign currency, it wouldn’t be able to afford a new airport.
How delusional can the man be?. An airport won’t make the world suddenly want to visit the country. Unless it’s being built on the cheap he likely won’t see much return on that investment.
Those Soviet area IL-62s will look so graceful in front of a brand new “International” airport where only North Korean, Burmese, Russian and Chinese carriers will call.
The stupidity with which this government spends its money is criminal.
I’m going to look at this positively (and without any real evidence, a la the “Pyongyang is reforming” tea-leaf readers) and say that this is a good sign, since it means the regime is having to look for alternate sources of hard cash and their other efforts are running into unknown difficulty.