Posted on 06/02/2005 6:49:44 AM PDT by prairiebreeze
ROME -- North Korea is sending millions of people from its cities to work on farms each weekend -- another indication that the risk of famine is particularly high this year, a U.N. official said yesterday.
The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) is the only aid organization that has a presence outside the North Korean capital,.
"It's not a new phenomenon, but it certainly caught our folks' attention in terms of the size and the scale," she said. "I suppose also we're so worried about the situation, it's one more sign that things aren't going well."
The isolated North has depended on outside support to feed its 24 million people since the 1990s. An estimated 1 million North Koreans starved to death after the Stalinist regime's state farm system collapsed after decades of mismanagement and the loss of subsidies from Moscow.
In Beijing on Tuesday, world aid agencies called for food assistance to North Korea to be stepped up despite a stalemate in talks to end its nuclear program, saying the communist regime still faces tremendous shortages affecting millions of people.
The WFP recently launched a new appeal for food donations, saying the supplies that let it feed 6.5 million North Koreans were dwindling and forcing it to cut off aid to children and the elderly. That followed a WFP request to governments for 500,000 tons of food for North Korea this year.
Of the $202 million that the agency appealed for this year, it has received about $72 million -- and practically all of it has been consumed, Miss Webb said.
"Unless something happens very soon, by the end of August, the only people we'll be feeding are 12,000 children in hospitals," she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at insider.washingtontimes.com ...
How does one go about gelding a eunuch????
Harvey didn't say Rumsfeld would find it easy.
Not a toughie-simple:
World opinion, good or bad, costs US tax-payers nothing.
Case closed.
LOL!
That's where I fall too, but I was trying to view this through a pol's eyes--who often have a different perception of reality than you or me.
Our Politicians are beginning to sound like my parents (God Bless them) when my brother and I ocassionally raised hell. "What will the neighbors think?" they would say. I spent a whole lot of my life worrying about what the neighbors think, until one day I decided to just let the neighbors worry about what I think.
Our politicians haven't as yet reached that plateau of rationality.
All the above is political speak for: "I see your point."
I have in mind the current hunger problem, not "what if".
Little Kim getting the "Ceaucescu" would be the best possible outcome. Then the South will have one heck of a time integrating the North. A poster on this board previously suggested setting up a "puppet regime" after the implosion. Bad term, however, unlike East Germany, where the people did have some access to the West in spite of the Stasi, in the case of North Korea, you are dealing with a people who have been isolated, brainwashed (and thoroughly messed up), and so conditioned to living in what amounts to the perfect police state. The Kim dynasty had outdone Stalin and Mao on this one. It may take a generation or two for the North to be brought up to speed before a full integration can take place.
Of course the North's view of integrating the peninsula would be to launch a bunch of human wave attacks, and wind up turning the entire peninsula into a glass parking lot. But that doesn't matter to Little Kim, the psycho hedgehog. He's safe in his bunker. Or so he hopes.
Tiny Kim is looking for something better than plaform shoes to give himself a little stature. He is a bug that will eventually have to be stepped on, either by his own hungry populace or by someone else.
It happened in Romania. All it takes is widespread misery and some incident to start the ball rolling downhill.
I agree. People need to wake up. That is why we fight wars. The people that want to be against wars don't realize that if we don't fight them we will be the ones going to the farms, death camps, or what ever you want to call them. God Bless America and all who have defended HER Past, Present, and the future to come.
If these poor people are starving, they won't be very good workers and won't last very long. Hard to maintain a population that way.
Like all other moribund regimes, NK will go out, not with a bang but a whimper.
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