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Niue offered key to holy city
New Zealand Herald, July 20, 2002
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=2098655&thesection=news&thesubsection=general
20.07.2002
By JOHN ANDREWS
A religious group based in Korea wants to build a $200 million walled holy city on Niue Island.
In return, the sect says, it is prepared to provide an airline service linking the isolated and hard-up nation of 1500 people with New Zealand, Fiji and beyond.
The holy city scheme is not the first grandiose plan to surface on Niue. A scheme to build a cyber city complex went belly up a couple of years when the promoter was discovered to be a fraudster.
The latest scheme involves an exclusive, guarded retreat, complete with temples and accommodation blocks for 600 people.
The promoters are headed by a cape-wearing Korean religious figure, “Sir” David John Kang M. Lee, said to be grand master of the world Christian Ambassador Mission Holy People University in Korea.
They want to use 121ha of Government lease farm land at Vaiea.
Thoughts of economic salvation emerged when Deputy Premier Sani Lakatani, two fellow politicians and a Government adviser accepted an expenses-paid trip to Baltimore in the United States to hear the Korean proposals for the walled city.
Through Chris Hong, the Korean-American founder of a dismantled medical school on Niue, they met Mr Lee, who claims his title “Sir” was awarded by an “imperial household of the Russian Federation”.
Mr Hong told the Weekend Herald the project’s promoters want to post guards around the holy city perimeter to keep out intruders and to bar Niue police from entering the compound to arrest people.
Mr Hong, who is seeking to re-establish his medical school and associated university as part of the deal, said it was he who had found Mr Lee and his prospective project backers.
At the Baltimore meeting, Mr Lakatani’s delegation members told Mr Lee, clad in cape and sash, that they regarded a jet airline service as Niue’s top priority.
Niue, which faces a budget deficit of about $2 million, has been hurting since the demise of its direct air link to New Zealand a year ago.
(…)
Mr Hong told the Weekend Herald he believed Mr Lee’s group was different from the Korean-based Moonies and was neither a sect nor a cult.
“It is a religious organisation but it is not a church,” he said. “It is an international organisation promoting a religious concept with the aim of one god, one faith, one world, one mankind.”
Mr Hong said Niue’s appeal lay in its remoteness.
(…)
One well-placed Niue source said some Moonie followers had wanted to set up something like the so-called holy city on Niue for a similar number of people about two years ago but no one had taken it seriously.
“But this is madness,” said the source. “It makes us look like a bunch of idiots. You will probably find the upper echelon in Niue would be horrified that we are going down this track and hope it is chucked out the window.”
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