Empty promises
Poor still struggling in North Korea
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, according to the British paper The Telegraph.
?That’s also when it’s expected that current dictator Kim Jong-il, 69 and ailing, will begin turning over power to his little-known and seldom-seen son, Kim Jong-un. He would be the third generation of Kims to hold absolute sway over the reclusive but noisily bellicose country.
The Associated Press reports that Pyongyang is undergoing a construction boom with the goal of building 100,000 new apartments plus shops, theaters and parks by 2012. Similar showpiece projects are said to be underway in other cities.
But that bustle may conceal a country in crisis.
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.”
South Korean news agencies report that this past week the 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.
But the fact that the students were ordered to work in the fields and on construction projects suggests the road to greatness, prosperity and power is not going as smoothly as the “Dear Leader” had planned. The people would probably just as soon settle for food.
Scripps Howard News Service