No one's quite sure. But the rest of the world's getting a clearer picture-during the first five months of 1999, there were 39 North Korean defectors. North Korea has been, along with Iraq, the US military's greatest concern since the end of the Cold War. At least 25 percent of the DPRK budget goes into the military, and although on paper, its army is close to twice the size of South Korea's and with twice the arsenal, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung doesn't see it going anywhere anytime soon. Namely because Jung-Il's war machine has run out of gas and spare parts. Thus, Kim's "Sunshine Policy" with the North-engagement with and aid to Pyongyang. Rather than bucking for a Nobel peace prize, Kim sees the pragmatism in keeping the North from imploding. South Korea's own shredded economy is ill-equipped to assimilate twentysomething million starving North Koreans who've never seen a baseball game.
The DPRK is perhaps the most closed society on the globe. It is also perhaps the most lobotomized. Obtaining information from abroad is illegal, as is picking up hitchhikers. Even bicycles were illegal until 1990. North Koreans can't even visit many areas in their own country. Talking to a foreigner is grounds for arrest. At press time, the few foreign expats living in Pyongyang were not permitted to leave the city.
The Chubby One has been stung by four years of famine-caused by floods and maladroit mismanagement of farmland-and a string of defections, including the high-profile bailing from the North of Hwang Jang Yop in February 1997 (and a number of lesser officials since). Hwang was number six (or 26 depending on who you talk to) in the pecking order and the architect of Pyongyang's juche ideology of self-reliance. How well that concept has worked is evidenced by Pyongyang's willingness to store Taiwan's nuclear waste for US$200 million worth of rice. Not to mention, of course, the US$1 billion admission ticket Pyongyang is trying to sell for a visit to the suspected underground nuclear facility at Kumchang-ri. That's self-reliance. As Mr. Hwang was recently quoted as saying: "At a time when workers and farmers are starving, how could we consider people sane who loudly say they have built utopia for them?"
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