ROK inspection team visits DPRK Olympic venues

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A delegation of inspectors from the Republic of Korea (ROK) traveled to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Tuesday to inspect venues where joint cultural and sports events will take place during the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics.

The team is making a three-day tour of the eastern Mount Kumgang area and the Masikryong Ski Resort, Yonhap reports.

The visit by 12 officials comes after a DPRK team's two-day stay in the ROK to inspect art performance venues in Seoul and Gangneung, a sub-host city of the Games.

The DPRK delegation is using the East Sea Line, one of the two inter-Korean passes, which has not been used since October 2015.

A performance hall and other facilities in the Mount Kumgang resort, where a joint cultural event will be held, will be the first site inspected.

Ski slopes stretching down from Taehwa peak, the top of Masikryong Ski Resort. /Photo via Masikryong Ski Resort Website

The delegation will then move to the ski slope in Masikryong to check roads and facilities ahead of joint ski training.

A trip to Kalma Airport, a military airfield that could be used to fly in ROK ski trainees, is also likely during the three-day visit.

A second DPRK inspection team will come to the ROK to tour Olympic stadiums and accommodation on the day the ROK delegation returns home, according to Yonhap.

The 2018 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games will run from February to March.

It is the first visit to the DPRK by officials from Seoul in almost two years, according to Yonhap.

Seoul's presidential Blue House rejected criticism on Tuesday that next month's Winter Games will be the "Pyongyang Olympics", saying the event will help defuse tensions over the DPRK's weapons program.

Some opposition politicians and conservatives in the ROK have been critical of the DPRK's particiption in the Games.

"Just one month ago, acute tensions gripped the Korean peninsula," Blue House spokesman Park Soo-hyun told a news conference. "We can't understand putting an outdated tag of 'Pyongyang Olympics' to the Pyeongchang Olympics, which will be a 'peace Olympics'."

Small but vocal groups of ROK demonstrators staged a protest at Seoul's central train station on Monday where a DPRK delegation had arrived.

One banner read: "We're opposed to Kim Jong Un's Pyongyang Olympics!".

They were "traitors and psychopaths" whose actions amounted to "defaming the dignity of the supreme leadership", said Ri Myong, of the Democratic Front for the Reunification of Korea, which is linked to the authorities in the DPRK.

"They are, indeed, human scum obsessed with pro-US sycophancy and confrontation with...fellow countrymen," said a statement carried by the DPRK's state-run news agency KCNA.

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