North Korea: Shiny New Airport Terminal

WITH a beaming smile and his head held high, Kim Jong-un took of the shiny new airport terminal earlier this week.

But there’s something he didn’t shout from the rooftops, and that’s the fact it was a killer project. Literally.

Hell hath no fury like the North Korean leader’s displeasure. And when the chief architect of the new international Terminal 2 in Pyongyang’s International Airport failed to impress with his design, he reportedly paid the ultimate price.

He paid with his life.

Ma Won Chun, director of the Designing Department of the National Defence Commission, vanished last November. He hasn't been heard from since.

It’s believed that Chun had quietly been executed “for corrupt practices and failure to follow orders,” The Diplomat reported, along with five other officials.

It came at the same time reports emerged of work on the airport being suspended because Jong-un wasn’t happy so it was partly demolished and rebuilt at his whim.

Workers had been reproached for failing to carry out an earlier order from July that the project should reflect North Korea’s “Juche” (self-reliance) philosophy and national identity.

Jong-un said there were “deviations in the interior layout including halls for check-in and departure”.

North Korean architecture is characterised by its monumental but drab socialist style, incorporating propaganda symbols of the communist state.

The new facility, reserved for international civilian flights, risks being virtually empty after it opens as Pyongyang has just a trickle of scheduled foreign flights.

When it opens, the airport’s existing terminal is expected to be used only for the country’s few domestic routes. Kim ordered construction of the new terminal in July 2012 because the existing terminal was considered too small and shabby compared with foreign rivals.

The new terminal is six times larger than the old one, but it remains unclear how North Korea will be able to generate the passenger numbers that would justify its construction.

It opens as the isolated Stalinist state remains one of the world’s least-visited countries with few scheduled flights to Pyongyang, mostly from Beijing and Moscow.