Posted on 01/20/2007 7:09:35 PM PST by blam
North Koreans cut off and freezing to death
By Sergey Soukhorukov in Pyongyang, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:02am GMT 21/01/2007
The men who finally made it into the remote highland village of Koogang were greeted by an eerie silence and a gruesome sight.
North Korean villagers search for firewood in the snow
Lying among the simple wooden huts and burnt remnants of wooden furniture, they found the bodies of 46 North Korean villagers, including women and children, all of whom had frozen to death. Cut off from the outside world by one of the harshest winters in many years, the villagers had suffered a macabre fate that has exposed both the desperate poverty and callous misrule blighting the Stalinist state.
More than 300 people are thought to have perished from cold so far this winter in North Korea's mountainous north, victims of temperatures as low as -30C and of an arrogant ruling clique.
"Nobody got out of the trap alive," said an official at the Chinese embassy in the capital, Pyongyang, who confirmed the events of Koogang. "After heavy snowfalls, there was a severe frost. The inhabitants were doomed."
In a country notorious for its secretiveness, the regime of President Kim Jong-il has made no mention of the deaths. As the rest of the population struggle to stay warm, 50,000 members of his ruling elite continue to live in splendid isolation in a compound in central Pyongyang – enjoying the benefits of hot water, central heating and satellite television.
Elsewhere in the city, though, the scene could have been lifted from the pages of a Charles Dickens novel. The air is thick with the smell of coal dust, as families light fires on the floors of their apartments to keep out the bitter, cold winds that blow south from Siberia.
Outside Pyongyang, the situation is yet more desperate. A six-mile drive from the city, poor farmers trudge through the snow with bundles of brushwood on their backs.
A massive process of deforestation, begun in the 1990s by Kim Jong-il's father and predecessor, Kim il Sung, has resulted in huge swathes of forest being chopped down to clear land for farming. The disastrous policy led to large-scale soil erosion, believed by many to have been a leading cause of mass famine of the 1990s, when up to three million people starved to death.
It has made the bitter winter, when the temperature in the capital routinely falls to -13C, even more dangerous as the rural poor struggle to gather enough firewood to sustain them.
The inhabitants of Koogang, around 200 miles north-east of the capital, set fire to tables and chairs, even tearing down the wood from their own homes in a desperate attempt to keep warm.
The World Food Programme estimates that North Korea will be 900,000 tons short of the amount of food needed to feed its 23 million population this year. Aid efforts have been complicated by sanctions, imposed after Kim Jong-il's regime carried out a nuclear test in October last year. Last week, the country held negotiations with US diplomats aimed at re-starting six-party peace talks, which also include China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.
Christopher Hill, America's chief envoy at the talks in Berlin, signalled progress, saying that the US looked forward "to establishing a normal relationship with North Korea".
But while there may be signs of a thaw in the country's frosty relationship with the West, in Pyongyang there is no respite from the sub-zero temperatures.
The electricity supply is notoriously unreliable and as evening falls the city streets are plunged into darkness.
The only constant source of light is the giant illuminated copper statue of Kim il Sung on a hill top overlooking the city – cold comfort for those living through the bleak North Korean mid-winter.
Supply lines (with supplies of course) have decided many victories and defeats throughout history...
But they are a nuclear power........
Liberalism is just as vicious, just you wait.
"The World Food Programme estimates that North Korea will be 900,000 tons short of the amount of food needed to feed its 23 million population this year."
This can't be true. N Korea is a workers paradise.
They make a charming couple, don't they?
-30C = +2.56F
-13C = +19.56F
A picture is worth 1000 words...
That one dot in North Korea is all of Pyongyang.
F is freezing water at 32, bioling at 212, for a spread of 180 degrees
c is 0 to 100
Thus 1C = 1.8F, and -30C = 32 - (1.8)(30) = 32 - 54 = -22F
so -30C is -22F
get it?
NK ping
The place where this statue stands is where a large church, able to accommodate 2,000 worshipers, used to be. It was called Chang-dae-hyun church. It was one of the most important land marks of Korean church at the time. This was a kind of Christian holy place in Korea. Now it was torn down and the hideous statue of blood-thirsty idol took its place. It is right that the statue be torn down and Chang-dae-hyun church be rebuilt.
Ping!
I feel sorry for North Koreans unless we could get Chia Pet out there their country going suffer for next ten or 20 years of coldness
THose YOU TUBEs remind me of those Marxist prograndra clips especially THE great leader working for his people yeah right majority of the people working for HIM
I strongly agree.
MONK you addict to photoshop like I am addict to YOU TUBE what would happen if photoshop stop what going happen to you ROFL
We should send Algore over there to bring the people some global warming.
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