Hunger once again stalks North Korea

Sep 24th 2008
From Economist.com

IN RECENT weeks, the list of unknowns about North Korea has shot up. Kim Jong IlKim Jong Il, the country’s 66-year-old dictator, has been out of sight since early August. Is he dead? Paralysed with a stroke? Or is he merely lying low in order to draw international attention to his regime’s antics?

If the second, is he still in charge of the country, and if so are the Dear Leader’s inchoate utterances being parsed by his younger but presumably powerful consort, Kim Ok, rather like Mao ZedongMao Zedong’s young nurses guarding the bedchamber during the Great Helmsman’s last days? As for the six-country process to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions: does the regime’s threat this past week to get the Yongbyon nuclear reactor up and running again represent an abandonment of that process, or is it merely bluster in order to extract bigger concessions from the United States?