Women trade sex for food in hungry Korea

HUNGRY young women in North Korean provincial towns are selling their bodies to Communist party apparatchiks for food, according to reliable witnesses who have recently returned to neighbouring China.

Prostitution — long associated with the national shame of “comfort women” enslaved by imperial Japan — is back as desperate families try to survive Kim Jong-il’s nuclear standoff with the outside world.

The women beckoning from the shadows show that Kim’s totalitarian rule is beginning to disintegrate. They come out on the streets in the evening and overtly lure older men who enjoy party privileges and access to food, the travellers said.

Abandoning Korea’s strict Confucian sexual morality, the women take customers to apartments or hotel rooms available only to officials, and the police do nothing to enforce the law.

The regime has also given up trying to stop private traders setting up stalls at crossroads selling pastries, nuts, snacks and beer.

North Korean officials evade questions about this breakdown in the party’s Stalinist economic theology, preferring to talk about Kim’s “market reforms”, which were meant to introduce wage and price mechanisms but instead brought chaos on top of misery.

“There is no economy,” said a senior aid official. “This is a developed country that has become undeveloped.”

The regime, awaiting international food aid and the next harvest, is now at the bottom of its annual trough in food supplies, just as it orchestrates to a crescendo the crisis over its nuclear weapons.

The tension is expected to come to a head in early September, when talks may open and a group of western nations, plus Japan, will start military exercises to intimidate the dictator.

Kim’s regime, for its part, will put on a belligerent display of armed might today at parades to mark the 50th anniversary of the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean war.

It has also threatened to declare itself a nuclear-armed state if no diplomatic progress is made by September 9, the 55th anniversary of the foundation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

This dangerous countdown was at the core of Tony Blair’s talks in Japan, South Korea and China, where senior western sources last week outlined a “twin track” policy combining the promise of talks with the threat of coercion by air, sea and land forces.

“It’s part hostage situation and part blackmail,” said a western diplomat involved in negotiations with the North Koreans. “You have to show them the threat as well as the inducement to good behaviour. Once the dealing starts, of course, then it’s high risk.”

As part of the plan, the Royal Navy may be asked to join an international interception force to stop and search North Korean ships for missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

The sea patrols are the main plank of a strategy agreed by the United States and 10 other nations to choke off exports of arms and drugs that reap an estimated £1 billion a year to fund Kim’s nuclear programme.

Britain took part in a little- noticed conference hosted by Australia on July 9 and 10 at which envoys worked out a series of military exercises. The plans call for operations from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, where North Korean vessels deliver cargoes to weapons clients such as Libya and Syria. The main effort, however, would be directed at North Korea’s ports.

The Americans took the lead in arguing for a hard line. “We are prepared to initiate interdictions right now,” said John Bolton, the US envoy at the meeting in Brisbane.

Others were less confident of the legal basis for interceptions on the high seas and experts are still hammering out a framework. One option is for Japan, Singapore and Malaysia to police any ships passing through their own territorial waters. American officials have talked of a “picket line” of warships poised to swoop on information from satellite and electronic intelligence.

The proposals also call for military and security forces to stop aircraft and land shipments.

The Royal Navy has already practised stop-and-search missions in Asian waters. British officials said HMS Liverpool, accompanied by the Royal Fleet Auxiliary’s Grey Rover, took part in an anti-piracy exercise off Malaysia last month.

The British ships joined units from America, Australia, Thailand and Malaysia in the exercise, which analysts saw as a dress rehearsal for a North Korean operation.

British sources in Tokyo said there were no immediate plans for new naval deployments but acknowledged that this could change at short notice once a political decision on the patrols was taken.

Caught between their dictator’s ambitions and a complex mesh of international politics, the unfortunate people of North Korea can only endure another season of hardship.

At least 42% of their children are stunted from chronic malnutrition, a recent United Nations survey showed. In 44 out of North Korea’s 206 counties, however, no foreign aid worker has ever been allowed to set foot. Conditions in these “closed counties” — home to troublesome citizens and secret military facilities — are feared to be far worse.

The girls on the streets are a visible sign that Kim’s world is in decay. But a silent, invisible tragedy is also unfolding behind the hermetic borders of his kingdom.

I would have to disagree... who spends more on military expenditures than the US? And do you see this type of desperation here (not including crackheads)?

That's like saying that Bill Gates needs to cut back on driving because gas prices are going up. The actualy dollar amounts really don't matter. What matters is the percentage of GDP that's spent on the military. I'd hazard a guess that in NK that percentage is much higher than that of the US.

I never bought the over-simplified "guns or butter" argument taught by leftist econ profs at public universities who were such poor economists they had to teach rather than make real money in the real world.

The concept of "guns and butter" is a simplified model that shows a simple concept. That when there are limited resources, using resources for one end means less resources for other ends. Of course it's oversimplified, but then again, it's for simple illustration of a simple concept. If you don't like "guns and butter," how about this... "Food for civilians VS food for party officials and military." Is that better? It seems that it's an important concept for leftists to learn, but one that they haven't seemed to yet. That choices need to be made when there are limited resources.

Mark

Reminds me of this funny Onion article:

Housewife Charged In Sex-For-Security Scam

AKRON, OH—Area resident Helen Crandall, 44, was arrested by Akron police Sunday, charged with conducting an elaborate "sex-for-security" scam in which she allegedly defrauded husband Russell Crandall out of nearly $230,000 in cash, food, clothing and housing over the past 19 years using periodic offers of sexual intercourse.


	Above: A 1993 photo of alleged "sex-for-security" scam artist Helen Crandall. Police suspect the groceries she is holding were paid for by her victim, husband David Crandall (right).

"It's the biggest scam of its kind I've ever seen," Akron police chief Thomas Agee said. "We're talking coats, dishwashers, jewelry, sewing machines, bathroom cleansers—you name it."

According to Agee, undercover agents spotted Crandall's husband handing her $50 in cash at approximately 4 p.m., just 30 minutes after the two had sex. Crandall then drove off in her car, returning home two hours later with five bags of groceries.

"That's when we made the arrest," Agee said. "After tracking her for years, we finally had proof that she was buying all those goods with dirty money."

During the arrest, Akron police officials entered the Crandall household and seized more than 150 items Mrs. Crandall had received from her husband over the last 19 years, including a four-speed adjustable food processor, 12 pairs of earrings, a matching sofa and loveseat, a box of two-ply kitchen garbage bags, and a portable radio.

In exchange for these items, Agee said, Crandall's husband received sex an estimated 950 times—most frequently in the master bedroom, but also in the downstairs den three times, and once on the floor of the sewing room.

In addition to physical evidence, Akron police have collected considerable eyewitness testimony. More than 250 Akron residents have come forward to report seeing Helen and Russell Crandall together, and several said they witnessed Mr. Crandall flagrantly purchasing items for his wife.

"Sure, they'd come in here," said Ray Greene of Greene's House and Home. "I think the last time they got one of those box fans with the three settings."

Perhaps the most damaging testimony has come from Mr. Crandall himself, who on Tuesday told police that while the couple was dating in 1977, Mrs. Crandall—then known as Helen Steuben—demanded that he buy her a ring worth over $1,000 before he could have sex with her. The first sexual liaison took place some six months later at Bob's Honeymooner Hotel during an all-expenses-paid trip to Niagara Falls.

It was also in 1977, Mr. Crandall said, that his wife quit her job at Shippee Shoes in downtown Akron.

"Clearly," Summit County prosecutor Andrew Dravecky said, "after quitting her job, the accused began receiving money under the table from some other source: How else could she have afforded to not work? It's now pretty apparent that at that point she began supporting herself by providing a certain service to Mr. Crandall."

Crandall's mother, Bernice Steuben, a resident of the Valley View Senior Home in Yuma, AZ, is being sought for questioning in connection to the case: Police suspect that Steuben may have introduced her daughter to the sex-for-security scam after having used it herself from 1932 to 1971.

But for all the evidence collected against Crandall, Dravecky said the case will likely be difficult to prosecute. "Helen was very careful to cover her tracks," he said. "She even got her husband to put her name on the bank accounts and credit cards."

The Crandall case is not an isolated incident, said criminologist John Ohlmeyer, who said there are "literally millions" of such cases across the U.S. each year that never come to court.

"This kind of thing isn't as uncommon as we'd all like to think," Ohlmeyer said. "A woman finds herself in a situation where she isn't employable. Or maybe she has interests like child-rearing, cooking and home-maintenance that keep her from getting a job. So what does she do? She cooks up a scheme to entrap a man using her body as the bait. It's frightening, but it happens every day in this country."

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