North Koreans are dying because of food shortages in rural areas, and a massive famine is just a matter of time, a South Korean aid group said Friday.
The food situation was as bad as the famine that hit the country in the mid-1990s, which left as many as 2 million people dead, Seoul-based Good Friends -- a Buddhist-affiliated group that sends food and other aid to the North -- cited an unidentified North Korean official Friday as saying.
"So far, mass deaths have not occurred as people have become more used to starvation than in the 1990s, but famine is a matter of time," the official was quoted as saying by the aid group.
Good Friends also quoted Kim Ki-nam, 39, a resident of Sariwon, south of Pyongyang, as saying one or two deaths were happening every day in rural areas around the city.
North Korea has relied on foreign assistance to help feed its 23 million people since the mid-'90s.
You see folks, this is how it works: You play nice on the world stage, otherwise, when things don't go your way, consequences are bound to happen. Kim Jong Il tried to play that the Americans were going to attack them, to create an artificial enemy. This is a classic move to deflect from growing internal problems. North Korea saw their nuclear program as a two fold solution to their problems.
First, they could use it as a defense against their imaginary American enemies.
Secondly, and this is more important, they could sell this technology to rogue nations at a very handsome price. In essence, they have created a black market for nuclear weapons. Syria found out the consequences of being a customer of North Korea's last September.
With the world against North Korea's nuclear program, it put them into a tight spot. They could use the nuclear weapons program as a lever to getting more aid from the world, but it also meant that they had to shut down their nuclear weapons program.
They had to race against time to sell everything they could, make as much money as possible, then turn around and say "we'll make nice and get rid of the nuclear weapons facilities if you give us more aid". The world fell for it.
What a lot of people seemed to have forgotten is that North Korea HAD a "no nukes for aid" deal that was made during the Clinton Administration.
THEY BROKE THAT DEAL.
If you break a deal, all bets are off. What the world should have done is stop all shipments of aid to North Korea, create a blockade against all trade, and given them 30 days to knock it off. If they refused, we should have created a coalition of forces, including Russia and China, and bombed their nuclear weapons facilities. Then, we should have waited another 30 days, still without sending aid, to really drive home the point that we're not fucking around when it comes to nuclear weapons proliferation. That is the price that you pay for breaking a deal. That would have prevented Iran from getting the critical nuclear technology that they have today and it would have prevented Syria from building that nuclear weapons facility that was bombed back in September. An pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood, they say.
Too many times, leaders are wanting to go to diplomacy, and while that is what you normally want to do, when we're talking about nuclear weapons, there's a whole different set of rules.
Travis
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