It’s a strange paradox, almost too surreal to be true and yet, in North Korea, it rarely isn’t. Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un was recently seen cutting a ribbon, smiling for state TV cameras, and inaugurating a massive beach resort designed to accommodate 20,000 people.

The Kalma Coastal Tourist Zone, a sprawling seaside resort on North Korea’s eastern coast near Wonsan, boasts high-rise hotels, water parks, and an ambitious image of luxury that appears to mock the daily realities faced by most North Koreans. It is, according to KCNA (North Korea’s official news agency) a “national treasure-level tourism city.”

For those familiar with the regime’s surreal propaganda machinery, this kind of description is not out of the ordinary. What’s extraordinary is how tone-deaf it all feels, even by Pyongyang’s standards.

An Oasis of Luxury in a Land of Hunger And Oppression

For a country that has long been sealed off from the outside world, and where independent information is tightly censored, the announcement of the Kalma resort has raised eyebrows –globally. Not for its scale, but for its dark contrast with the grim reality inside the country. Outside the bubble of Pyongyang’s elite, the majority of North Koreans live with limited access to electricity, inadequate healthcare, and chronic food shortages.

When North Korea closed its borders in 2020 due to the pandemic, it also severed its crucial trade lifeline with China, halting the inflow of food, fertilisers, and farming equipment. As a result, famine-like conditions worsened. Kim himself admitted to a “food crisis” in rare public remarks.

But even then, his priorities appeared clear – fund missile launches and build propaganda palaces rather than feed the starving. Against this backdrop, the Kalma resort feels like a fantasy, not for the people, but for the state.

Who Is This Really For?
While KCNA claims that the resort will begin “serving domestic guests” starting July 1, it is obvious this will not include the average North Korean.

Domestic travel is heavily restricted, and the cost of visiting such a facility is far beyond what ordinary citizens can afford. Experts agree: this is a playground for Pyongyang’s privileged few, high-ranking officials, party elites, and their families.

According to Lim Eul-chul, a professor at South Korea’s Kyungnam University, the initial guests will likely be “the privileged domestic elite of Pyongyang,” reflecting Kim’s ongoing effort to appease his core support base even as the rest of the country suffers.

The resort also features its own train station and sits adjacent to an international airport, signs that the regime is eyeing future foreign visitors, especially those willing to pay in hard currency. But for now, international attendance at the opening was limited to one notable guest: the Russian ambassador. That detail speaks volumes about Pyongyang’s shifting alliances and growing dependency on Moscow as relations with the West deteriorate.

A Show of Strength or a Mirage?
This isn’t the first time North Korea has tried to use tourism as a soft-power tool or economic lifeline. Back in the late 1990s, Mount Kumgang became a rare point of inter-Korean cooperation, allowing nearly two million South Koreans to visit over a decade. That ended in tragedy in 2008 when a North Korean soldier shot a tourist who had strayed into a military area, a moment that shattered hopes for peaceful tourism on the peninsula.

Fast-forward to today, and Kalma appears to be another attempt at building a similar tourism economy, this time tightly under regime control and without the messiness of South Korean engagement. In fact, many of the Mount Kumgang sites were demolished in 2022 after Kim declared them “shabby” and “backward.” It seems the North Korean gameplan now favors glitter over goodwill.

Vostok Intur, a Russian travel agency based in Vladivostok, is already promoting Kalma tour packages for July and August, each costing around $1,840. These include flights from Pyongyang to Wonsan and a visit to the nearby Masikryong Ski Resort another symbol of Kim’s tourism ambitions built in 2013.

But like everything else in North Korea, these trips come with strings attached. Foreigners are closely monitored, barred from photographing anything deemed sensitive, and often forced to sit through curated cultural performances. The smiling children in colorful costumes may seem innocent, but they are also instruments of state messaging.

Building Dreams While the Nation Starves
There’s a deeper tragedy lurking beneath Kalma’s glossy facade. It’s not just about misallocated resources or failed priorities it’s about delusion.

Kim Jong Un’s regime has tested dozens of ballistic missiles in recent years, reportedly spending over $500 million in 2022 alone ironically, more than what’s needed to close the country’s annual grain shortfall. 

The Biting Realities

Since 2020, North Korea has only grown more suffocating under Kim Jong Un’s iron rule. According to Dr. Edward Howell, a North Korea expert at the University of Oxford, Kim has tightened his grip with a “severe approach towards social control,” aimed at extinguishing any flicker of foreign influence. The regime, fearful of ideological “contamination,” has criminalized not just the smuggling of information, but even curiosity about the outside world.

If and when Western tourists ever make it to the Kalma resort, one thing is guaranteed they won’t roam freely. Their movements will be monitored. Their cameras, censored. Their experiences, carefully stage-managed in a Truman Show-style simulation of a functioning, happy state.

But beyond this curated illusion, reality bites and hard.

In one of the world’s most tightly sealed states, information rarely leaks out unless the regime allows it. Yet, the few smuggled testimonies that have made it to the outside world paint a portrait of suffering so grim it verges on the unbearable.

When the pandemic struck in early 2020, Pyongyang responded not with aid or reform, but with isolation. The border with China (the country’s most vital trade route) was slammed shut. No grain, no fertilisers, no agricultural equipment. Predictably, the result was widespread hunger. But in a regime driven by optics, feeding the people ranked lower than fortifying border fences and issuing shoot-to-kill orders against anyone who dared approach.

An untold number of North Koreans starved to death. Those who once relied on unofficial markets (the black-market lifelines of daily survival) found them barren. Smuggling became nearly impossible. With nothing left to sell, many simply gave up. Some disappeared into the mountains to die alone. Others, we are told, ended their own lives at home.

It’s not just food that has been weaponized, information has too. Under the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act, passed in late 2020, North Koreans can be executed for watching South Korean dramas or sharing foreign music. The law was designed to prevent “corruption” from the outside world, but what it really targets is truth. The truth that South Korea is free and flourishing. That there is another life, another possibility, just across the river.

But the river, once a route of desperate escape, is now heavily militarized. Before the pandemic, over 1,000 people a year managed to flee North Korea, most by crossing into China via the Yalu River. Today, those numbers have plummeted to near zero.

The Last Bit, Fear

And perhaps, Kim’s deepest fear is not the West, not invasion, not even sanctions  but the truth – the truth that no amount of concrete poured into beachfront resorts can drown out the sound of the psychological toll on North Koreans, which is immeasurable, not just because of what they endure but because of what they’re denied: the right to know, to dream, to dissent.

Living under constant surveillance, where a misplaced word can cost a life, people learn not just to fear but to forget what freedom even feels like. For many, survival has become a slow erasure of self.

And what of the future? If Kalma Resort is any indication, Kim Jong Un’s regime is betting on spectacle over substance, a Potemkin paradise designed to distract from decaying foundations. Tourism, they claim, is a pathway to economic growth. But how can a country attract visitors when it punishes curiosity, criminalizes information, and executes those who try to leave?

In the global arena, the silence is deafening. While Russia sends tourists and China looks the other way, much of the international community has grown numb to the North Korean tragedy. Sanctions exist, yes but so does normalization. Leaders issue statements, but rarely push harder. It is easier to mock the absurdity of waterslides in (often) a famine-struck nation than to reckon with how little the world has done to change it.

Kalma Resort may be new, but the script is not. Build illusions, suppress truth, project strength, and keep the world guessing, while inside the borders, hope is starved, voices are silenced, and futures are sealed.