Nepal backs Korean climber in summit dispute

KATHMANDU - The government of Nepal Friday came out strongly in support of an embattled South Korean, whose claim to be the first woman to have tamed all the 14 highest peaks in the world is now being doubted by her own country’s top climbing body.

After enduring a similar dispute in April, 44-year-old Oh Eun-Sun Friday faced the resurrection of the same doubts about her feat with the Korean Alpine Federation doubting whether she had really reached the top of Mt Kangchenjunga in 2009, her 10th scalp in an extraordinary climbing career started in 1997.

On Thursday, the federation had held a meeting of seven Korean climbers who had climbed the 8,586-metre peak straddling the Nepal-Tibet border and their opinion was that the topography shown in the photographs taken by Oh seemed to vary from the actual landscape.

The controversy as to whether Oh had actually been atop the difficult peak had erupted for the first time in April this year after she scaled Mt Annapurna in Nepal, the last of the 14 peaks towering over 8,000 metres and claimed the title of being the first woman to have achieved the feat.

Starting in 1997, she had already climbed the other 13, including Mt Everest, and the difficult Nanga Parbat in Pakistan.

Her closest rival, Spain’s Edurne Pasaban, who reproduced the feat soon afterwards, said there were discrepancies about the South Korean’s claim.

Sceptics say even one of Oh’s Sherpas - who has not been named - had said she stopped short of the actual summit, a critique that Oh rejects.

Now, reacting to the revived dispute, Nepal’s mountaineering and tourism department, that issues certificates to successful climbers in Nepal, said it was standing by Oh’s Kangchenjunga claim.

“We had issued a certificate in 2009 indicating Oh Eun-Sun, as per our records, had successfully climbed Mt Kangchenjunga,” said Laxman Bhattarai, spokesman at the tourism and civil aviation ministry. “Our records still show that she reached the top of the disputed mountain.”

Though the world’s most loved and respected climbers like New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mt Everest with Tenzing Norgay Sherpa, had condemned the commercialisation of mountaineering and its degradation as a trophy sport, the trend doesn’t show any sign of abating.

There is now increasing jousting to set new records and the use of money to buy one’s way to summits.

When she celebrated with a party in Kathmandu in April to celebrate her new record, Oh Eun-Sun had told IANS that the controversy was fuelled by the fact that she was an Asian.

“Had I been from Europe, there would have been little controversy,” she had remarked.

(Sudeshna Sarkar can be contacted at sudeshna.s@ians.in)