Even the soldiers are hungry now

The Pyeongyang regime's gross mismanagement of the economy is claiming new victims everyday.  Joshua at One Free Korea links to a report from the Daily NK which reports that now even soldiers are starving.    Soldiers generally get about 20% more food than members of the general population, so if they are starving we could be looking at another arduous march.

Joshua points out the likely end to that soldiers story:

The Army tells him he's going home to recover, and the soldier would like to believe that, too. But this train is running between Chongjin and Sinuiju, one of the areas where food aid is seldom let in. The odds are that this 19 year-old soldier will not recover.

He is going home to die at 19. Of starvation.

The Chosun Ilbo writes about the new tape (in Korean).

People are still starving in North Korea despite a decade of food aid from South Korea, the USA and a host of other nations.  This starvation was not caused by natural disasters (Bad weather does not stop at the DMZ and South Korea quickly recovered from the same disasters).  It was not cause by a lack of arable land (North Korea only has to feed about half the population that South Korea must feed).  It was caused by two things; the horrific government policies of Kim Il-sung (continued by his son) and the lose of Soviet aid that made it possible for Pyeongyang to engage in those policies.

The most damnable thing about the whole situation Kim Jeong-il and his crew are in effect holding their own people hostage.  They know that the USA and South Korea (among others) will continue to feed their starving people, freeing them to maintain using 30%-plus GDP on their military.

Here is the reality of the situation; with the Soviet cash cow gone North Korea is going to have to either open up (including allowing greater human rights) or change regimes.  Yes, it is really that simple. 

Groups who advocate 'food first' want to cover an ax wound with a band-aid and hope that the bleeding stops by itself.  It will not.  There will be 'good times' when only a relatively small amount of people starve, but there will also be more arduous marches.  Waiting for North Korea's food situation to stabilize before pursuing improvement in human rights is a prescription for doing nothing because North Korea's food situation will not stabilize until there is a major change in Pyeongyang.

Comments

[Joshua]

Thanks for the link!

[jtb-in-texas]

Tragic... and just one more one more reason (i.e., the senseless death of a conscripted teenager) to hate "socialism" or "communism" or "planned economy" or whatever the word du jour is...

Stick this one in your "village"...

[Scott-in-Japan]

"Stick this one in your "village"..."

But, but... the United Nations will lead us to a world full of rainbows and fuzzy bunnies....

/grumble.