North Korea

[Guest guest]

Probably should have gone on the Ahimsa list instead, but not being

sure if that one's still up and running, I share some info here:

 

Swedish channel 1 showed a British Channel 4 documentary on hunger in

North Korea yesterday. Most of the footage shown in the documentary

was taken by a North Korean refugee who had joined a resistance group

of refugees in China and gone back under a false pass to take shots

of starving children, abandoned factory cities and death camps to

spread the information about the regime to the rest of the world. The

footage had then been smuggled out to resistance group members in

China with the risks of jail and execution for everyone involved.

 

The program also featured shots from a tourist trip to Pyongyang,

interviews with refugees in China and in South Korea and interviews

and more covert filming by aid workers in Europe who had given up

working in North Korea made by the Channel 4 journalist team.

 

The collective information from this shocking documentary only

confirmed the worst speculations of the North Korean regime echoing

what we have seen and heard from other totalitarian regimes:

 

-Hunger because of a ruined economy (and not floods and bad weather

alone like the North Korean government has blamed) is widespread.

 

-Families and communities have starved to death. Orphaned children

are either left to fend for themselves in the streets or locked

inside boarded up houses to starve to death.

 

-Entire families and communities are kept in death camps where the

women are often sexually abused by the guards and children are forced

to execute each other.

 

-Factories have been dismantled by workers for the parts to be sold

for food on the black markets and factory cities have turned to ghost

towns.

 

-The government earns money for the upkeep of the military by

planting poppies and selling the harvest as street drugs in the West.

 

-Aid workers are not allowed to inspect and verify that food

shipments are distributed in villages and small towns. Instead, the

food is sold on the black market or diverted to government and party

members.

 

-Due to starvation, human meat can be found for sale on the markets

and ppl have been killed specifically to provide meat for sale.

 

-Some teenagers and young adults make it over the border to China,

earn some money there and smuggle it back in to North Korea to feed

their starving families. These kids regularly cross the dangerous

border areas to support their families.

 

The program also blamed South Korea and the West for turning a blind

eye to what goes on in North Korea to appeace the North Korean

regime. The producers understood the West's need for security but

blamed the West for uncritically accepting the regime's charm

offensives of late. They regarded these as attempts from the regime

to receive aid from the western world without having no commitment to

or intention of distributing the food to the general population.

 

The information in the documentary only confirmed what other smuggled

out footage and reports that have reached the media in the West since

the alleged crop failures began a few years ago has hinted at.

 

 

A.