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CNN Live At Daybreak
North Korea In Economic Crisis
Aired February 20, 2002 - 06:02 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: President Bush stepped back from his "axis of evil" stance against North Korea today appealing for reunification with the south. President Bush joined South Korean President Kim Dae-jung at the Korean Peninsula's demilitarized zone, when a gesture, a symbolic gesture, Mr. Bush signed a railroad tie from a line severed due to the Korean War. The president's message, "may this railroad unite Korea". Mr. Bush later elaborated on a future Korea.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: My vision is clear. I see a peninsula that is one day united in commerce and cooperation instead of divided by barbed wire and fear. Korean grandparents should be free to spend their final years with those they love. Korean children should never starve while a massive army is fed. No nation should be a prison for its own people.
COSTELLO: While Mr. Bush was at the DMZ, hundreds of anti U.S. protesters fought with riot police in downtown Seoul. Many protesters were farmers who said World Trade Organization rules had crippled their livelihood.
North Korea, as you know, is virtually cut off from the rest of the world. Our senior Asia correspondent, Mike Chinoy, takes us inside that nation for a look at what its leaders do and don't want us to see.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MIKE CHINOY, CNN SENIOR ASIA CORRESPONDENT: A torch light parade through the center of Pyongyang. Hundreds of thousands of people pledging their loyalty to the world's most extreme personality cult, a throwback to the China of Mao Tse-tung, Stalin's Soviet Union and the all powerful dynasties of ancient Korea.
This is the side of North Korea the government wants you to see, a place of stifling socialist conformity where the leader Kim Jong Il is treated as a virtual God. On the rare occasions when he appears in public at carefully choreographed mass rallies like this, the people are indoctrinated to go wild.
Kim inherited the cult from his father, the late President Kim Il Sung, North Korea's founder, the man who started the Korean War, whose image is everywhere, who is also the object of intense veneration from the giant bronze statute overlooking Pyongyang to the immaculate marble halls of the Mausoleum that contains his embalmed body.
Visiting North Korea, I've always been struck by how the extravagance of the Kim cult and the resources devoted to sustaining it stand in sharp contrast to the other side of North Korea, a country of economic catastrophe and desperate shortages of food, where the cities have almost no electricity, the hospitals no medicine, where over a million people are believed to have starved to death since the mid 1990's and many remain at risk today.
Most pictures of the North Korean crisis have come from aid worker like Kathi Zellweger, who's visited the country 36 times.
KATHI ZELLWEGER, CARITAS: The combination of a very dismal health care system plus not enough food, of course, still makes people suffer and people do die.
CHINOY: But the breakdown of North Korea's rigid socialist economy has spurred some other less evident of potentially significant changes.
HAZEL SMITH, U.S. INSTITUTE FOR PEACE: There's been a massive change. This country's inextricably -- it can't go back. It's irreversibly gone into a market economy.
CHINOY: Hazel Smith just finished a year based in Pyongyang for the World Food Program. She and other aid workers say that while political controls remain tight, free markets are springing up everywhere, along with a growing awareness that North Korea must change.
SMITH: There's much more acceptance that to survive, to move forward, the country and the people in it are going to have to interreact (ph) with Westerners and with the West.
CHINOY: For a fiercely independent nation, surviving on international handouts while seeking accommodation with long-time enemies has been a wrenching change.
And that may help explain why North Korea is so hard to read -- on the one hand offering cooperation with tough conditions, on the other maintaining a huge army and selling missiles overseas, leaving analysts and policy makers to debate whether it is really part of an "axis of evil" or simply the last relic of the Cold War struggling uneasily to come in from the cold.
Mike Chinoy, CNN, Seoul.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
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