Richard Lloyd Parry, Asia Editor
Ashley Tyner
North Korea is damping down on mobile phones and long distance phone calls to prevent the spread of news about a worsening food crisis. Vitit Muntarbhorn, a Thai law professor who has never been allowed to visit North Korea, says N. Korea's government is using public executions as a means of intimidating the population, and is using spies to infiltrate and expose religious communitites. This report came tow days after the World Food Program said that 2/3 of the population does not have enough to eat, in the country's worse crisis since almost 3 million people died of famine 10 years ago. Muntarbhorn has stated "over the past year we have had very worrying information of a very chronic food shortage."
Recent visitors to the country report that N.Korean's are no longer allowed to use mobile phones at all. The few foreign tourists are made to surrender their mobiles on arrival, then returned only when departing the country. There are also reports that a Korean mobile phone service, which would not be able to communicate with the outside world, is being planned for a possible launch early next year.
WFP announced that some 2.7 million people on N. Korea's west coast will run out of food in October and increasing. The government is still in firm control of the country and its grip on the lives of citizens shows no signs of easing.
1 comment:
This is terrible, I'm a little concerned about where your personal reaction was to the article? Regardless, this needs to be changed and I would have been interested to see what you would have suggested an appropriate solution would be.
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