North Korean people need food more than they need slogans
Posted by Subhan Choudhury on July 6, 2011
The North’s people are starving. They need to be fed food, not the stable diet of neo-Stalinist slogans. North Korean government rations, believed to be keeping two-thirds of the population alive, have been steadily reducing, down from 400g per person per day in April to 150g in June – the equivalent of a small bowl of rice. The situation has become so dire that an increasing number of North Koreans have resorted to eating grass. The next main cereal harvest is due in October.
The European Union announced earlier this week that it would deliver $14 million in emergency food aid to North Korea to help people at risk of dying amid growing fears of a worsening hunger crisis. The aid will mainly go to the northern and eastern provinces of the country.
On the contrary, North Korea’s leaders have promised their people that the country will have fully achieved its aim of becoming “a great, prosperous and powerful nation” in 2012, the 100th anniversary of the birth of its founder, Kim Il-sung.
Videos smuggled out by North Korean dissidents show widespread starvation and deprivation, filthy children orphaned by the regime left to subsist as best they can on garbage and handouts. One shows a grimy woman dressed in rags who says she’s 23 but looks 10 years younger. She says she survives by selling grass she cuts along a roadside, whether for human or animal consumption was left unanswered. When asked what she eats, the woman softly replies, “Nothing.”
North ordered its universities to cancel all classes until next April. Some analysts believe it’s to disperse the students lest they start getting ideas from the popular upheavals in North Africa and the Mideast.
