The Korea Situation

Some friends and family have asked me about Korean anxieties these days, given the recent North Korean attack on South Korean territory that killed two Marines and two civilians.

To me this pales against the sinking of a South Korean warship earlier in the summer, which killed many more people, but the more recent attack on an SK island has been perhaps more emotional to a nation as it was an attack on a civilian community as well as a military outpost.

North Korea continues its bravado--demanding food and fuel supplies while spending its money on military weapons and technology--and more people in South Korea seem to disbelieve that any aid the reclusive country gets actually goes to citizens.

There is an increasing net of North Koreans who are given cell phones by South Koreans , and then there are the increasing numbers of "defectors"/refugees who return via a circuitous route through China . . . many of whom tell of the large numbers of people placed in North Korean concentration camps and who say that no food aid was ever received in the countryside.

North Korea needs money and food. But the money it gets it spends on the military. It uses the military to create crises. More aid is demanded. And so a vicious cycle ensues.

The south Koreans--I read in a recent news report--are angered by the recent island attack, and that seems to be true. But more are waiting for China to wake up and face facts and to do something to help stabilize the area.

It's not so much a crisis as a recent development in a long-running conflict between the North and the South.