A Nation Of Famine And Adulation

Do they believe? As his country totters on the wrong edge of economic disaster, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's propaganda spouts increasingly fanciful tributes to the country's ruler. His first clothes were "a battle-smoke-scented guerrilla uniform.He experienced two revolutionary wars before his teens.He enjoys a nap in a running car or a firing range rather than in a quiet office room." Or so says an article in the Dec. 2 Rodong Shinmun (Workers' News).

Yet just two weeks earlier, a U.N. report warned of a seventh straight year of hunger in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. That says a lot more about what Kim's rule has wrought since he took over after his father's death in 1994. Poor weather coupled with an imploding economy means that the country will be able to grow just 61% of its food this year, depending on foreign aid for more than one-third of the total. It is a shocking state of affairs for a country that was once an industrialized power with substantially more economic muscle than its bitter rival, South Korea. During a late-October trip to Pyongyang, officials talked openly to me of the food and power shortages the country was undergoing. Publicly, they blamed the weather. But what do they, and the ordinary people in the street, really think?