(Please note the title above comes from the print edition–KSH).
North Koreans are used to struggle and heartbreak. But the Nov. 30 currency devaluation, apparently an attempt to prop up a foundering state-run economy, was for some the worst disaster since a famine that killed hundreds of thousands in the mid-1990s.
Interviews in the past month with eight North Koreans who recently left their country ”” a prison escapee, illegal traders, people in temporary exile to find work in China, the traveling wife of an official in the ruling Workers’ Party ”” paint a haunting portrait of desperation inside North Korea, a nation of 24 million people, and of growing resentment toward its erratic leader, Kim Jong-il.
What seems missing ”” for now, at least ”” is social instability. Widespread hardship, popular anger over the currency revaluation and growing political uncertainty as Mr. Kim seeks to install his third son as his successor have not hardened into noticeable resistance against the government. At least two of those interviewed in China hewed to the official propaganda line that North Korea was a victim of die-hard enemies, its impoverishment a Western plot, its survival threatened by the United States, South Korea and Japan.
evan miller wrote:
I read this yesterday on line. What a nightmareish country! It sounds even worse than Stalin’s Russia or the Third Reich. Just unrelenting misery, deprivation and hopelessness.
[reposted by request – Elf]
I saw some recent pictures of North Korean soldiers yesterday, and all of them were enlisted men…….every single one of whom was as skinny as a rail. Their high-tranking officers and Kim Jong-Il himself, however, appeared well-fed. Pencil-thin people seem to be common in North Korea, but it’s different south of the border.