2nd North-South Summit Postponed due to Flooding
by Richardson ~ August 18th, 2007. Filed under: Asides.From the AP: “North and South Korea agreed Saturday to postpone the second-ever summit between leaders on the divided peninsula to early October due to recent floods that devastated the impoverished communist North.” That also likely means there will be no, or very little, ground element of the Ulchi Focus Lens joint U.S.-ROK exercise, which had already been postponed from August due the the North-South summit.
August 18th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Yeah some of the pictures are pretty scary looking, and since it hit the showcase city, a lot of work needs to be done. One in particular:
http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/08/15/nkorea.floods.reut/art.lamp.ap.jpg
So yeah, as you know, a lot of the prime fields were wiped out too according to One Free Korea, so things are not looking so good right now. So the north is asking for more aid, but according to some reports like this one:
http://www.star-telegram.com/279/story/203403.html
“Questions raised
“There is a history of the North Koreans exaggerating the extent of natural disasters in order to obtain aid,” said Marcus Noland, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
In 1995, the North said floods had displaced 5.4 million people, but international aid agencies instead found 500,000 homeless, Noland said.”
So it is unclear what the real numbers are, but Marcus Noland is pretty savvy in the economic goings on in North Korea, so I can place a pretty good wager he may be right. However, from the pictures, it does not look so great either because it affected the elite which Kim needs to keep happy at all costs. See, when the story first broke out, I was wondering why the KCNA admitted to something like that, but when Pyongyang got hit, it made sense.