Camping

Now that the Cata­lan (and Va­len­cian) beach sea­son is once again rolling into obliv­ion many peo­ple seem to have for­got­ten (if they ever knew) that back in the busy days of late June, a del­e­ga­tion of North Ko­rean of­fi­cials vis­ited Barcelona, Benidorm, and the nearby va­ca­tion com­plex of Ma­rina d’Or (lo­cated in Or­pesa in Va­len­cia, and owned by a Barcelo­nan). Be­fore we go on, it should per­haps not be over­looked that the North Ko­rean regime - in place since 1953 - is not a nice one. In his mem­oir ’This is Par­adise!’, refugee Hyok Kang re­calls the 1990s under Kim Jong-Il, when mil­lions died of famine (in­clud­ing most of Kang’s school­mates and teach­ers) while the Dear Leader him­self was gorg­ing him­self on im­ported del­i­ca­cies and swig after swig of pricey booze. (70% of the pop­u­la­tion are still suf­fer­ing from chronic mal­nu­tri­tion). In Kang’s small town alone, six to seven ex­e­cu­tions a year were car­ried out, for ’crimes’ such as steal­ing cop­per wire; the vic­tims were put on dis­play in a spe­cial padded suit which turns red when the bul­lets hit them but pre­vents the blood from splash­ing the spec­ta­tors. Army of­fi­cial Kim Yong, on the other hand, has writ­ten about being sent to Labour Camp 14 with his mother, be­cause it had been dis­cov­ered that his fa­ther, a street food ven­dor liv­ing near the de­mar­ca­tion line, had once sold his fare to Amer­i­can sol­diers. Yong found him­self work­ing in mine shafts nearly a full kilo­me­tre below ground, sub­sist­ing on grains of boiled wheat and corn ker­nels. He watched as his mother was shot for try­ing to eat some grass. (When the North Ko­re­ans re­cently repa­tri­ated Amer­i­can Otto Warm­bier with his brains smashed to a pulp, it was al­most cer­tainly to avoid his pro­vid­ing eye-wit­ness tes­ti­mony of camps like this). In­deed, ac­cord­ing to the UN, HRW and AI, North Korea is one of the worst coun­tries for human rights abuses on the planet. The North Ko­rean of­fi­cials on the Va­len­cian coast were look­ing for in­spi­ra­tion for a pro­jected hol­i­day com­plex in Won­san, a city on the coun­try’s east coast. It is no sur­prise, per­haps, that they fell in love with Ma­rina d’Or, a stun­ningly dull leisure re­sort with build­ings that look like minia­ture ver­sions of Py­ongyang’s - only less in­ter­est­ing - and whose dwellers can ei­ther choose be­tween being at their wit’s end for some­thing to do, or get­ting so pissed that they end up laugh­ing hol­lowly on the edge of swim­ming pools or slouch­ing mo­rosely on café ter­races. The ques­tion re­mains: why did the Span­ish gov­ern­ment allow rep­re­sen­ta­tives from one of the world’s most hor­ri­fy­ing dic­ta­tor­ships to sniff about in Barcelona, Benidorm and Or­pesa? And, more to the point, why were there no pop­u­lar protests against their visit? After all - and I’m aware that this is a bit ob­vi­ous - if they’d come from, say, Is­rael ...