Posted on 07/26/2003 3:49:42 PM PDT by Pokey78
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.
Ah, the benefits of being a fat old bureaucrat; nothing like "interns" and access to food. Government worker for life is what we all should aspire to.
What victims they are. The poor dears. Hello? What's happening to everybody else over there? The men? The ugly women? The not-so-young women? Children? They are starving to death. So who are we directed to feel sorry for? The only people who can find a way to get any food in that damned place. |
BTW, we OWN the UN.
Then sell it and cut our losses now please. As an American I do not vote for my government owning nor ruling any international nor Foreign governments. Nor do I condone using my military to add muscle to international corporations / conglomerates while paying "volunteer" Americorpsfolk to provide homeland security.
The UN is not a gov't. That's in spite of the best efforts of some power-hungry people to make it such and others to assume something is reality that isn't so.
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Forty notes, most of them concerning the indignity of these young women having to choose between starvation and prostitution.