Posted on Drudge tonight and in tomorrow's N.Y. Times. Basiclly N. Korea is saying it will be testing Taepodong missiles in next couple of weeks. Apparently these have a range of 3,500 to 6,000 miles making a hit on Alaska or Hawaii possible. Pretty nasty threats also issued from Central News Agency. Would appreciate someone providing link.

-- Gia (laureltree7@hotmail.com), August 03, 1999

Answers

Don't know how to do a link but this should do. Copy and paste!

http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

-- freeman (freeman@cali.com), August 03, 1999.

See also William F. Buckleys recent article North Korea Knocking

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX TUESDAY, AUGUST 03, 1999 20:09:22 ET XXXXX

N. KOREA WARNS: 'NO GUARANTEE FOR SAFETY OF U.S. MAINLAND'

North Korea's official news agency on Tuesday warned that there is "no guarantee for the safety of the U.S. mainland when the U.S. ignites a war against the north in the Korean peninsula."

The threat came on the same day North Korea acknowledged for the first time that it is preparing to test a missile.

U.S. military officials now believe that North Korea could, within the next few weeks, test a Taepodong 2 missile -- a powerful new rocket with a range of 3,800 to 6,000 miles that would put Alaska or Hawaii within its reach.

"Whether we test-fire a satellite or a missile is a legitimate, independent right to be exercised by a sovereign state," the Korean Central News Agency stated.

The United States has threatened to use "all available means" if North Korea goes ahead with a Taepodong 2 test.

Wednesday's NEW YORK TIMES, which leads with a N. Korea story, runs quotes predicting that if a Korean missile should fall in Japanese territory, and particularly cause casualties or some destruction, Japan, with the help of the U.S., could then "destroy North Korean missile sites".

In the war of words, the Korean Central News Agency warns: "A war on the Korean peninsula is neither a war like a military drill of unilateral offensive as in Yugoslavia and Iraq nor a dispute like a simple conflict. A war here is a large thermo-nuclear war in which more than a thousand nuclear bombs with explosive power of 13,000 kilotons deployed in South Korea will go off and a world war which will soon escalate beyond the Korean peninsula."

-- a (a@a.a), August 03, 1999.

I think I just soiled myself

-- (VRMVq @ . ), August 03, 1999.

Orion.... Can I borrow some TP? (I wonder why we didn't hear about this on MSNBC?)

-- Lobo (atthelair@yahoo.com), August 03, 1999.

Well, I guess they didn't like the food we sent them, and prefer to eat the bark off the trees... can you imagine the splinters?

Every time these a**holes are looking for a hand out, they rattle their weak little missles at us. Maybe if they spent some of that money protecting their own infastruture, especially the agricultural one, they could get a life and not worry about what we're up to...

I hope we don't have to blow them up before y2k takes what's left of their pathetic society the rest of the way down the toilet. Worried about North Korea... yes, it's like worrying about a nasty tempered 2 year old waving a knife saying "I cut yooo..." you talk to them, but if that doesn't work, you smack the shit out them, take the knife away, and let them spend some time out in their room...

-- Carl (clilly@goentre.com), August 03, 1999.

This figures! What's an end of the world without at least ONE war???

-- Mara Wayne (MaraWayne@aol.com), August 04, 1999.

STRATFOR has an interesting analysis in their archives, at least I THINK it went to archives, where they calle NK an interesting case of the Crazy Man Next Door. NK makes claims and noises like an insane group of clowns and the world beats a path to their door, bearing gifts. This may be either more of that, riding on the coattails of their master state (China) or under the suggestion of China.

Pays yore money and takes yore chances.

Chuck

(Mine however is on Ed Dames for his FIRST TRUE success, which would be unfortunate)

-- Chuck, a night driver (rienzoo@en.com), August 04, 1999.

a- Thanks for reference to the article; North Korea Knocking. The whole thing IS a mess. Just when you think you've heard it all....

-- Gia (laureltree7@hotmail.com), August 04, 1999.

The test the DoD is conserned about is not a missle test, but an underground weapons test. My Insider friends think they may be on the verge of demonstrating their nuclear capability this is not just sword rattling. The Imf's NK starvation project is an example of total failure. All nations have a right to feed their population. Dont follow leaders who use food as a weapon and secretly want this confrentation to escalate. Work for peace and peoples right to exist.

-- y2k aware mike (y2k aware mike @ conservation . com), August 04, 1999.

What does North Korea want this time? I wish someone would just finish them off so we could stop getting their empty threats.

-- b (b@b.b), August 04, 1999.

Then theres this (link at worldnetdaily.com):

Chinese forces on highest alert HONG KONG: Sections of China's People's Liberation Army stationed on the coast facing Taiwan have been put on the highest level military alert, a report here said Tuesday, heightening the row over Taiwan's claim to statehood.

``Some key departments have been put in level-one,'' China's highest state of military preparedness, the Beijing-backed Ta Kung Pao said, citing an unidentified military source. The troops were based along the Taiwan Straits coast in south-east Fujian province, the report said.

Other PLA forces in the region were on level-three, the lowest of China's three-tiered military alert system. ``PLA missiles were also deployed in the front in Fujian, and it is predicted large-scale military exercises will take place,'' the newspaper said in a despatch from the Fujian capital Fuzhou, quoting other unnamed sources.

``If Taipei refuses to take back its opinions concerning separating from the motherland as early as possible, our PLA forces will not be able to bear it anymore,'' the military source who revealed details of troops on a level-one alert said. ``The ball is in (Taiwan President) Lee Teng-hui's court. It all depends what his next move is.''

-- Jon Johnson (narnia4@usa.net), August 04, 1999.

8/6/99 -- 12:21 PM

Signs of imminent NKorean missile launch, U.S. official says

WASHINGTON (AP) - North Korea delivered rocket fuel this week to the missile launch site where U.S. officials believe it is preparing to fire a long-range missile in defiance of U.S. warnings, a senior U.S. official said today.

The fuel deliveries were an additional indication that North Korea may launch as early as this month, although no missile has yet been detected at the site, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

U.S. intelligence also has detected activity by North Korean radars at the launch facility this week, including those radars expected to be used in tracking a ballistic missile in flight, the official said.

The Pentagon on June 30 first publicly acknowledged that U.S. intelligence had detected ``some preparations'' for a launch in coming weeks or months, but it has declined to be more specific about the signs.

North Korea's first launch of a Taepo Dong missile, last Aug. 31, took the U.S. government by surprise and triggered outrage in Japan. The missile flew over Japan and landed in the Pacific.

U.S. officials have pressed the North Koreans to halt development of long-range ballistic missiles capable of striking U.S. territory, but the communist nation insists its weapons are meant for self-defense.

U.S. Navy ships equipped with sophisticated electronic gear are in or near the Sea of Japan to collect technical data on any North Korean missile launch.
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-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), August 06, 1999.

[ Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only ]

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/99/08/st080804.html

SURVIVORS TELL OF PLAGUE OF HUNGER IN NORTH KOREA

SURVIVORS TELL OF PLAGUE OF HUNGER IN NORTH KOREA

Refugees hiding in China speak of starvation, hard labor and death tolls that dwarf official accounts

Sunday, August 8, 1999, By Richard Read of The Oregonian staff

YANJI, China -- The survivors stagger out of North Korea, braving river rapids and sentries' bullets to reach an unlikely promised land.

To a Westerner this remote corner of China, with its lumbering donkey carts, speeding Volkswagens and policemen on the take, is a fast-developing authoritarian region still rooted in the Third World. Yet to a hungry North Korean, China looms as a beacon of prosperity and human rights, where oxen are fat, rice is plentiful and people can speak their minds without fear of being hanged.

"Chinese pigs and cats live better than North Korean people," said Chui Mihua, a 25-year-old woman who swam across the Tumen River and was taken in by a Korean-Chinese family.

It is here in China, after harrowing escapes from their closed, repressive country, that North Korean refugees in hiding summon courage to speak of starvation, hard labor and disease. The country they describe is grinding to a halt after economic collapse, floods and decades of Stalinist control.

Mines and factories sit idle. City dwellers lug water to high-rise apartments with no electricity.

The refugees have foraged with their communities for grass, leaves and bark. They have watched helplessly as relatives grow sick and die. Schoolchildren have lined up to watch people accused of cannibalism face firing squads. They describe corpses festering in parks and railway stations.

Until now, North Korea's totalitarian leaders have managed to conceal much of this devastation from official delegations, diplomats and even relief workers, whose movements are strictly controlled.

But now, for the first time, researchers peering through the same Chinese window on North Korea have pieced together a statistically rigorous assessment of the crisis.

By tallying the accounts of refugees from the area across from Yanji, a Johns Hopkins University team found that death rates between 1995 and 1997 were seven times higher than previously reported by the 1993 North Korean census -- the only yardstick previously available. Birth rates in the same area plunged, according to the study, which was supported by institutions including Mercy Corps International, the Portland-based relief organization.

Households shrank as family members died or left to seek food.

If the death rates in the northern region were representative of the country as a whole, more than 2 million of North Korea's 23 million people died from famine or related causes during the three-year period. That death toll would be higher in percentage terms than African famines or China's Great Leap Forward in the 1950s.

"You're looking at the kind of famine that those who have worked in famines, at least in the last half century, are not that familiar with," said Courtland Robinson, lead author of the study, which was published in the British medical journal The Lancet last month.

Robinson, an associate at the Johns Hopkins center for refugee and disaster studies, said today's relief workers are much more used to working with highly visible famines in rural areas.

Recent interviews with two dozen refugees, and a day's drive on rugged roads along China's border with North Korea, provide unprecedented views of the devastation inside the world's ultimate Cold War holdout.

The refugees

Rumors of the wide gap between North Korea and China prompted a Communist Party official named Kim to leave his wife and children behind two years ago.

"I wanted to see how China could feed more than a billion people," said Kim, who, like many refugees, spoke on condition that his full name be withheld.

Kim, 39, fled across the country in a stolen car.

On the way, he saw shuttered factories, starving beggars, stalled trains and cars, widespread power failures and corpses in streets. He and other refugees said that people throughout the country suffer from ailments including hepatitis, diarrhea, typhoid, skin diseases and parasites.

"There is often no food, no fuel, no electricity, even no soap, so people wear filthy clothes patched together here and there," Kim said. "People survive on grass gruel. Each day instead of working for their farm or factory they search for tomorrow's food."

Kim and other refugees said that they occasionally saw truckloads of donated food but that they never received any themselves.

Mercy Corps, which leads a consortium of groups distributing food donated by the U.S. government to North Korea, channels the aid to orphanages and other institutions and programs to ensure it reaches those inside the country who need it most. Separately, Mercy Corps gives food to refugees in China, providing nearly 5,000 sacks containing rice, sugar, oil, aspirin and lentils.

North Korea's own food supplies reportedly go to elite members of society. "The government is triaging," Robinson said. "It's choosing to use food to feed productive or strategic elements of society first, like the military, party cadres and residents of Pyongyang," the capital.

As a party member, Kim left behind such privileges. Reaching the border, he bribed a guard with the equivalent of about $50. He tied plastic around each of his legs and waded waist-deep through icy water in darkness to China.

These days Kim works as a night security guard in China. He drinks heavily sometimes, missing his family. He assumes that because of his disappearance, they have lost special rations and other perks. Kim hasn't contacted his family since he left two years ago for fear of jeopardizing them further. He thinks that because of his party membership, he would risk execution by returning.

Between 50,000 and 150,000 North Koreans like Kim hide out in the regions surrounding Yanji at any one time, Robinson estimates. Several times as many cross back and forth each year, he figures.

Chae, a 35-year-old construction worker from the border city of Musan, has crossed twice to China. He walked across the frozen Tumen River last year in search of food for his pregnant wife. When he returned, someone reported him.

Police sent Chae to Namyang Prison, where he saw seven inmates die of hunger. He lost four teeth when a guard beat him.

"While I was in prison, my wife gave birth," Chae said. "Soon after, she died of hunger. The little girl died, too, because there was no milk.

Chae broke his handcuffs on the way to sentencing and fled again to China. He waits in a pastor's home, hoping to get money and clothes for a return trip to bring out an uncle and aunt. "I never saw my daughter's face," he said.

Casablanca on the Tumen

Many of the North Koreans who survive the treacherous Tumen River crossing melt into China's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, home to more than 800,000 ethnic Koreans.

The hub of the agrarian region is Yanji, a bustling city of well-stocked department stores and grimy sidewalk factories. This Chinese Casablanca swarms with North Korean spies trying to intercept refugees, South Korean and American intelligence agents gauging conditions inside the north, Chinese security officers tracking the foreigners, and the odd Russian or Japanese operative watching the fray.

The luckier refugees find shelter in private homes, taken in by ethnic Koreans whose ancestors began migrating to China in the 1880s to escape famines. Others crowd into the homes of Korean Chinese pastors or shelters supported by contributions from abroad.

In cities, they spend their days inside, avoiding neighbors' prying eyes and the risk of deportation. In the countryside, when a visitor arrives by car, they scatter into the hills to watch from a safe distance.

China has avoided setting up refugee camps, fearing they would become magnets. Policemen generally ignore refugees, knowing they can't afford bribes. But every so often -- sometimes in response to foreign news reports on the refugees -- Beijing sets a quota for arrest and deportation.

China forcibly returned about 10,000 refugees last year.

The research

Amid the migration and intrigue, the researchers from Johns Hopkins randomly selected 440 refugees in Yanbian for interviews last summer.

They asked the North Koreans about births, deaths and migration patterns in their households during the past four years.

A chilling picture emerged. Death rates among the refugees' families nearly doubled in three years, reaching 5.6 percent in 1997. That compares with an annual death rate of 0.7 percent in China and 0.9 percent in the United States.

"In your own town, if almost 6 percent of the people you knew died in the space of one year, that would be dramatic," said Robinson. "It's dire. You can't sustain that very long."

What's more, birth rates dropped by almost half, reaching 0.7 percent. Deaths of babies increased.

Children's growth was stunted.

Refugees interviewed by the researchers had traveled an average of 160 miles to reach China, mostly on foot. Most came from North Hamkyong Province, one of the least accessible regions to foreigners monitoring food distribution.

Researchers decline to estimate the national death rate because they don't know whether their sample actually represents conditions nationwide. They did ask refugees for information about households whose members remained in North Korea, finding those numbers similar.

"So whatever's happening in North Hamkyong is not peculiar to those people who are sending a migrant into China," Robinson said. "It's bigger than that."

Yet because Kim Il Sung's death preceded the floods and economic collapse, some North Koreans continue to revere their longtime president.

"Because he died, the situation got worse," said Chae, a weathered 73-year-old woman. About two-thirds of the refugees ultimately return to North Korea, the researchers found.

There, they tell trusted relatives and friends that everything they were told their whole lives about their country's superiority and invincibility was a myth. The realization is merely a taste of the mass trauma in store whenever North Korea does finally open.

Already the North Korean government has lost its ability to prevent citizens from traveling within the country without specific permission. Police checks on trains and buses, as well as the food rationing system, once kept people firmly in place.

"That again is something that is very frightening for the government to admit," Robinson said. "The substantial internal movement is in some ways even more threatening than large numbers of dead because of course the dead are no longer a threat, are they?"

The border

A drive along China's border with North Korea points out the glaring contrast between the two countries.

In China, fat brown oxen graze by vast fields of corn, rice and potatoes. Chinese road workers use trucks, bulldozers and pumps to build a freeway as straight and smooth as a U.S. interstate.

Townspeople stack bricks to enlarge neat stone houses with trim tile roofs and ample woodpiles.

Just across the Tumen River in North Korea, corn plants cling to precarious, deforested hillsides, cultivated to feed growing numbers of people migrating to the border. In cities, smokestacks are empty, trains and cars are absent and even bicycles are few.

Large placards on hillsides proclaim: "Long live Kim Jong Il, the sun of the 21st century!"

China's side of the Tumen River is flat and open, with crude gravel roads tracing the shore. North Korea's fields are dwarfed by a dark wall of hills broken only by tributaries, where bleak towns hug the riverbanks.

North Korean sentries stay out of sight, while Chinese soldiers are evident mainly at border crossing points.

Even the corpses that wash up from North Korea get no peace. North Korean authorities refuse to accept them from Chinese officials, who are prohibited from burying foreigners in China. So ethnic Korean citizens of China often bury the bodies at night in unmarked plots.

The women

North Korean women face particular danger, as traders sell them into marriage or prostitution in China.

A 26-year-old woman, who spoke on condition that her name be withheld, decided to leave North Korea two years ago when the coal mine where she worked shut down after flooding. Pumps left by Japanese before World War II finally broke beyond repair.

"My mother said, 'If we only had a relative in China, they could help us,' " the woman said. "I wanted so much for my mother to be happy. I decided to go to China and make relatives."

A North Korean marriage broker offered to introduce the woman to a potential husband in China. The broker escorted her to the border with other women. He bribed a guard. The group walked across the ice at night.

Soon after they arrived, the woman found that she had been sold to a farmer for about $375 -- more than seven times the area's $50 average monthly wage.

China's population policy of one child per couple helps fuel the trade in brides. Since it began in the late 1970s, the policy has resulted in abortions and abandonment of baby girls by families that favor boys. China now has far more men of marriageable age than women.

Relief workers in northeast China estimate that Korean and Chinese traders have sold more than 30,000 North Korean women in China as brides or prostitutes. The going rate is $300, down from $500 last year because refugees are more plentiful.

North Korean women are often fairly well educated, leaving them little in common with the semi-literate farmers who buy them.

The farmer who bought the coal miner turned out to be mentally retarded and unable to have children.

Relief workers in China avoid buying back the freedom of North Korean brides, fearing that payments would only fuel the trade. But if a husband can't be persuaded to release an unwilling wife, a Chinese policeman often can be hired to free the wife without arresting her.

This woman suffered through 10 months of grueling work, planting crops for neighboring farmers, before she ran away from the remote rural area. Reaching a Chinese border city, she happened on a Protestant church. There she accepted shelter from the Korean-Chinese pastor, joining other refugees in his cramped home.

Seven months later, the woman remains too terrified to leave the house. She fears discovery by her Chinese in-laws, deportation by Chinese police or punishment by North Korean security agents -- or all three.

"I can't go outside, even one step," she said.

The repression

Outsiders might well ask why, in a country with widespread starvation, repression and poverty, citizens don't revolt. The answer in North Korea is that control and punishment remain so harsh, and propaganda so effective, that few dare protest.

A 13-year-old girl nicknamed "Little Lee" saw three executions by the time she was 11.

Wearing yellow shorts, a peach-colored shirt and a flowery plastic barrette, Lee sat cross-legged recently on the floor of a Chinese home. She spoke in a sweet, high voice, looking half her age in a cute pixie haircut.

If not for the interpretation from Korean, an English speaker might have assumed that Lee was describing some innocent childhood pursuit.

"They tied his eyes, mouth, chest and legs," Lee said. "All of us schoolchildren went to see it. "When they shot him, it was very disgusting. I felt sick."

Lee's teacher told the class that the man had stolen copper to melt down from a sign that quoted Kim Il Sung's words.

Refugees describe a strict caste system that, along with an elaborate intelligence apparatus and ruthless penalties, keeps the population in line. Society is divided into eight levels, in descending order of status:

 Veterans of the war against Japan, their families and descendants.
 Veterans of the Korean War and their relatives.
 Party members, Olympic medalists and other celebrities.
 Ordinary people.
 People whose families prospered under Japanese control.
 Criminals convicted of nonpolitical offenses.
 Relatives of South Koreans.
 Political offenders and their families.

Party members accused of fleeing to China sink to the lowest level.

"The reason my wife and I fled is that my brother, who was in the party, was executed after he returned from escaping to China," said Yun, a professional athlete who had to leave his 4-year-old daughter with grandparents. "It would affect the standing of our family."

A 32-year-old steelworker named Park buried his grandparents and 26 other people who died from causes related to starvation before he fled to China. He recalls one protest in Musan, his hometown, staged by about 30 young people one morning last March.

"They were swept off as soon as it began and shot," Park said.

Recent executions involved people arrested reportedly for cannibalism. Tales of people eating human flesh are widespread -- although unsubstantiated. Chui Yongmi, a 23-year-old woman who fled to China in 1997, saw a couple and their two sons executed the year before in Hoeryong for allegedly eating six people whose severed heads were exhumed.

"They used nine bullets per person," Chui said. "Before they did it, they stuffed gravel in their mouths and beat them, so they couldn't speak."

Little Lee, the girl who saw three executions, escaped North Korea with her mother last year, leaving her father and two brothers behind.

She would like to go outside or learn to play the harp, but her mother says not to do anything that would alert Chinese neighbors to their presence.

So instead she studies the Bible.

"Can you help get my little brother out?" she asked.

You can reach Richard Read at 503-294-5135 or richread@aol.com. Researchers Lovelle Svart and Gail Hulden contributed to this report.

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-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), August 08, 1999.