ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, April 9, 1997 TAG: 9704090056
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: TOKYO
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST
MEMO: NOTE: Shorter version ran in Metro edition.
The Ohio congressman reported "slow starvation on a massive scale ... wherever we made an effort to look."
People in the North Korean countryside are starving, underweight and ``rapidly descending into the hell of a severe famine,'' according to Rep. Tony Hall, D-Ohio, who just completed a rare three-day visit there.
``Evidence of slow starvation on a massive scale was plain wherever we made an effort to look,'' Hall said, adding that conditions had deteriorated significantly since he made a similar visit last August.
Hall said he was allowed unlimited access to villages north of the capital city of Pyongyang, where few outsiders are permitted. He said he met an elderly woman making a soup from year-old cabbage leaves; he visited an unheated hospital with no medicine that was so cold he could see his breath; and he saw ``shockingly underweight'' children, many of whom were orphaned when their mothers had died from malnutrition.
``I doubt one of them will live to see this year's harvest,'' Hall said, briefing reporters at the U.S. Embassy here on his return trip to the United States.
Hall's bleak assessment of the situation inside North Korea mirrors those of the relatively small number of other outsiders who have been allowed to visit. The U.N. World Food Program says the Stalinist nation is on the verge of famine and it has issued an appeal for massive amounts of immediate humanitarian food aid.
But North Korea's secretive leadership has so tightly controlled information from inside its barbed-wire borders that there has been only a modest response to the country's calls for help. Also, many countries cannot abide the idea of sending food to a nation that, despite impending famine, still spends billions of dollars a year to maintain one of the world's largest military forces.
Japan announced this week that it will not provide any immediate food aid to North Korea, despite the urgings by the World Food Program; by the United States, which has pledged $10million; and by South Korea, which has pledged $6 million.
Japanese officials said North Korea's suspected involvement in a kidnapping of several Japanese residents in the 1970s, including a 13-year-old girl, make it impossible for them to provide food assistance.
North Korea has also demanded massive amounts of food aid as a condition of attending talks aimed at establishing a permanent peace on the Korean Peninsula. The United States and South Korea have ruled out sending food as a condition to holding the talks.
Hall, who has devoted much of his congressional career to hunger issues, said such political concerns should be secondary to the potential mass starvation in North Korea.
LENGTH: Medium: 60 linesby CNB