Private University in North Korea Reopens Despite Travel Ban
Washington has said it would consider a one-time, special-validation visa for journalists, humanitarian workers, Red Cross officials
and those who travel for "the national interest." The Pyongyang university said it would apply for such a visa for American volunteers.
4, 2017
SEOUL, South Korea — The only foreign-funded private university in North Korea started a new semester on Monday,
but without its usual American professors because of Washington’s ban on travel to the country, university officials said.
The university’s founding chairman, James Kim, and its chancellor, Park Chan-mo, both American passport- holders, visited the campus in August
but had to leave last week before the travel ban went into effect, university officials said.
The United States announced the travel ban in July in response to the death of Otto F. Warmbier, an American college student who
had been serving a 15-year sentence of hard labor in North Korea after being convicted of trying to steal a political poster.
The travel ban, which took effect Friday, has threatened the operation of Pyongyang University of Science
and Technology, a school in the North Korean capital that was financed by evangelical Christians abroad.
But the university’s rare experiment came into question as two of its volunteers, both of them Korean-Americans,
were detained this year by the North Korean authorities on vague charges of committing "hostile acts."
The ban came into effect amid heightened tensions between Washington and Pyongyang over North Korea’s latest nuclear test.
