N Korean children begging, army starving
The video, broadcast by ABC Television today, shows orphaned children begging for food in the streets and a party official ordering a vendor at a private market to give her a donation of rice for the army - once quarantined from food shortages.
Describing the video as "journalism that carries the death penalty", the ABC said the North Korean journalist who risked his life to get the footage to the outside world spent several months in North Korea collecting the footage before smuggling it out to China.
The video reveals that soldiers, once quarantined from food shortages, are now going hungry.
"Everybody is weak," a young cadet soldier tells the reporter's hidden camera.
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"Within my troop of 100 comrades, half of them are malnourished."
The ABC said the video was taken by an undercover North Korean journalist over several months earlier this year and smuggled out of the communist country to China.
The ABC also broadcast video showing labourers building a private railway track near the capital Pyongyang for ruler Kim Jong-Il's son and apparent heir Kim Jong-Un.
"This rail line is a present from Kim Jong-Il to comrade Kim Jong-Un," the undercover journalist is told when he asks the building site supervisor what they are doing.
Japanese publisher Jiro Ishimaru, who instructed the undercover reporter on how to use the camera, told the ABC the footage was important because it showed the weakening of Kim Jong-Il's regime.
"It used to put the military first, but now it can't even supply food to its soldiers," Ishimaru, who edits a magazine featuring insider accounts of life in North Korea, told the ABC.
"Rice is being sold in markets but they are starving. This is the most significant thing in this video," Ishimaru said.
"People are suffering terribly because of the chaotic economic situation and the crumbling government."
Impoverished North Korea has requested overseas food and relief groups have said that the state faces imminent shortages, saying people are again eating grass and tree bark.
The United Nations has pleaded with international donors to overlook political difficulties in the face of a humanitarian crisis, saying six million people are in danger of not getting enough to eat.
Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans died in a famine in the 1990s.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...27/3253979.htm
This is a terrible situation , almost like you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. Although everyone wants the NK dictatorship to fall , one can not stand by idly while people starve to death.
And once you give food aid , you are propping up the regime by default.
No food without reforms. The key is that international food aid was always primarily given for military, police and party apparatus staff. The civilian population had to satisfy themselves just with remains...
Dear BASTARD of NK have money for buying stuff for his birthday but no food.
I don't understand why would the US donate so much food to NK.
Now if everyone stops donating food to NK then there could be a revolution.
Now everyone is thinking but what about the poor souls? Well it will save more lives like this in the long run.
BUT it is a gamble
Oh North Korea - you so crazy.
I feel for the people but No revolt? No food.
I don't reckon the poor souls would have the energy for a revolution.Originally Posted by Annihilator9112
they should start importing food
Just curious.
A question mainly to S.Koreans here: Why N.Korea has such huge problem with food?
Its not that they don't know or don't want to grow it, growing rice is extremely simple. And I don't believe its a problem with organization. So why?
How S.Korea deal with its food?
It IS a gamble, most likely you will just have a famine first killing (tens of) millions before a revolution (if any). How will the US or anyone else be viewed after that? Because, starving Africans get food, but NK won't because of ... their regime. It's a tough moral dilemma.
They say people get the leaders they deserve, but I don't believe it always applies. In fact it probably doesn't apply at all with a brutal dictatorship with a strong army like NK, that's also completely isolated from the outside world with people clueless about anything in the world except what the regime tells them.
What can people really do but die in any such attempt at revolution?
Historically, the southern part of the Korean peninsula was agrarian while the northern part was more industrial. Korea is also very mountainous and I read somewhere that only 30% of its land is arable.
In the years immediately after the country was divided, North Korea was apparently better off and the regime implemented several successful programs that would have put many advanced societies to shame.
Then around the late 60s, the ROK got its act together and started catching up and at some point in the next few years, overtook N. Korea. The ROK was never self-sufficient in terms of food (or rice) but it now had hard currency to import needed supplies. Today, it is one of the biggest importers of grain and when Korea is in the market to buy rice or soybeans, it moves markets.
Meanwhile, up north, Kim Il-Sung was building up his personality cult. As part of this cult, Kim surrounded himself with sycophants and cronies who fed him lies instead of telling him how bad things were becoming. This coupled with several disastrous economic experiments, bad planning, natural disasters and deforestation all created the tragedy we are, unfortunately, witnessing. Now, had it not been a hereditary dictatorship, the country might have had a chance to right past wrongs. But since power was handed over to someone even less qualified to run a country, its people are paying for the sins of its leaders--with their lives.
Korean Peninsular as whole is unsuitable for sustaining more than 10 million people due to mountainous terrain and cold weather.
Rice doesn't like cold weather very much. Look at the Korean War Memorial in Washington DC, you have the statue of US soldiers wrapped in blanket, with an expression of paralyzing coldness in their faces. All they could remember was snow, snow, comrades freezing to death in the middle of nowhere, and the endless wave of Chinese troops charging.growing rice is extremely simple.
http://cloudking.com/artists/heather...rial_large.jpg
Imports 80% of food.How S.Korea deal with its food?
Thanks for the answers guys.
If I remember correctly, North Korea was also hit by terrible weather a few years ago in the form of floods and storms.
Wait a few more months for it to become a severe food crisis then invade. Give food as a reward for support as the army marches in.
The overthrowing of this regime is long overdue.
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