The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion Tourism to North Korea isn’t about engagement. It’s torture porn.

By
June 23, 2017 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Pallbearers carry Otto Warmbier’s casket after his funeral at Wyoming High School in Wyoming, Ohio. The American college student died after being released from detention in North Korea. (John Sommers/Reuters)

Suki Kim is author of “Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite.”

The death of Otto Warmbier on Monday, only six days after being released by North Korea, is a tragedy in more ways than one. In January 2016, Warmbier, then a 21-year-old American college student, was arrested in Pyongyang for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster, for which he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. Upon his release, it was revealed that he had been in a coma for more than a year.