The Associated Press’s story on the 15-year prison sentence that the North Korean government has handed down to American college student Otto Warmbier contains a strange assertion.
“Arrests of tourists [in North Korea] are rare,” the AP says.
To even the casual news observer, that would seem like an odd statement: In the past two years alone, at least four American tourists (Jeffrey Fowle, Matthew Miller, Merrill Newman, and now Mr. Warmbier) have been detained in Pyongyang. And when one considers the vanishingly small number of Americans who visit North Korea each year, it becomes obvious that the arrest rate among tourists is actually shockingly high. (That should come as no surprise, of course. The North Korean regime treats its own citizens like prisoners. Why would it be any different for foreigners, especially hated Americans?)
Perhaps 2,000 Americans are thought to travel to North Korea each year. At the current arrest rate of two per year, the arrest rate stands at one out of 1,000, or 0.1 percent.
By contrast, some 60 million Americans travel abroad each year. About 2,500 Americans are arrested overseas each year, for an arrest rate of .004 percent. Or, let’s put it this way: If Americans were arrested in North Korea at the same rate as they are in the rest of the world, then one out of 24,000, rather than out of 1,000, would be arrested each year. Yes, the arrest rate for American tourists in North Korea is 24 times higher than in the rest of the world.
In recent years, international tourism has become an important source of cash for the Kim regime. (Yes, the “adventure” tourists who visit Pyongyang are helping to fund the gulag, the nuclear weapons program, and the secret police etc.) So, if foreigners are feeling increasingly skittish about visiting North Korea, the AP’s bizarre assertion on the “rarity” of arrests is quite a nice little favor to the regime. Of course, the AP has its reasons for making an in-kind contribution like that.
