Imperialist propaganda doubtless, eh?
Michael Pugliese
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/common/story_page/0,4511,1570180%255E8882,00 .html
Human flesh on sale in North Korea By Stephen Lunn in Tokyo 02jan01
STARVING North Koreans are reverting to cannibalism to survive, while farmers have been ordered to grow opium for state-endorsed overseas sale, a maker of television documentaries has claimed.
Carla Garapedian, producer of Children of the Secret State, a BBC-Channel 4 co-production, said film smuggled out of North Korea, and interviews with refugees escaping the communist state, revealed "acts of unspeakable barbarism not seen since Pol Pot's Cambodia". "(The) footage is shocking. Starving children abandoned by the state. Orphans thrown into state asylums and left to die," Garapedian wrote in an opinion article run this week in Japan's Daily Yomiuri newspaper.
Worse, she said, were the drawings of 15-year-old Jang Gil-su, who with his family fled North Korea into China and has, while still in hiding, been recording his experiences of everyday life in his former country, where millions of people are understood to have starved to death.
The pictures, given to Garapedian by a refugee support group in Seoul, depict families eating pine bark, rats, snakes and anything else to stay alive. One shows a man at a market stall, with Jang captioning it "Man selling human flesh (saram hoki) at a farmers' market in Hoeroung city".
"All of the North Koreans we interviewed knew about it. Jang's picture of a dismembered child in a cooking pot says more than any of the numbing statistics," Garapedian wrote.
Independent verification of the practice is difficult because Hoeroung city is impossible to visit or contact in the secretive country.
"You eat it without knowing it is human flesh. You're so hungry you just eat it," she quotes one orphan as saying, claiming more than 200,000 orphans are starving in North Korea, despite the country receiving the second-most food aid in the world.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, desperate to garner more international aid with a freezing winter in full swing, is trying to open up his mysterious country to the outside world.
Australia was one of the first nations to reintroduce diplomatic relations with North Korea early last year. Since then, many nations have taken steps to follow suit, including Italy, Germany and Britain.
Garapedian said she had spoken to farmers who claimed to have been barred from growing food and instead ordered to grow opium. "The opium would then be processed by the state into heroin and then sold abroad. The proceeds would go to arm the military," she wrote.
North Korean officials could not be contacted for comment yesterday.