North Korea's botched currency reform has aggravated its chronic food shortages, leading people there to use drugs and turn to suicide, civic groups here said Monday, unveiling a rare interview with more than a dozen North Koreans.
The civic groups conducted face-to-face interviews with 14 North Koreans living in Pyongyang, Sinuiju and Hamgyong Province. Those interviewed came from different age groups and occupations, with one being a soldier, though their identities were withheld for security reasons.
The interviews were conducted jointly by Greater Korea United and the Committee for the Democratization of North Korea in a Chinese city bordering the North last August. The details were released Monday along with some video clips.
Eleven out of the 14 respondents said North Korean society is "very unstable," and 12 people said the country's economic situation and their own lives grew "much worse," the survey showed.
Eleven of the 14 also said they want to flee the country due mainly to severe food shortages.
"The regime's food rationing system is not properly working. I've heard that Kim Kyong-hui has diverted the aid from South Korea including rice and other daily necessities," one of the respondents said. Kim Kyong-hui is North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's sister, who currently heads the Workers' Party's light industry department.
"As life is getting tougher, more and more people are turning to suicide," she said, adding "the botched currency reform in 2009 made things worse than the 'arduous march' of the late 1990s," during which around 3 million North Koreans died from hunger.
Pyongyang carried out a massive currency reform in November 2009, the first currency redenomination since 1959, to rein in galloping inflation, squash free market activities and tighten state control over the economy. But the measures instead caused massive inflation and worsened food shortages.
"Narcotics are available at markets under the name of 'a happy drug.' We call it 'ice,' which is known to many as a cure-all," another North Korean man said in the interview.
Experts have said the North's food crisis has worsened, as Seoul halted unconditional aid to Pyongyang in 2008 and slapped sanctions on the communist country last year in retaliation for the sinking of a South Korean warship blamed on the North. Devastating floods, which washed away tens of thousands of hectares of farmland in the North earlier this year, also aggravated the situation, they added.
In the latest sign, rice prices have more than doubled in Pyongyang in just two months, with a kilogram of rice rising to 3,800 won this month from 2,500 won in September, the South Korean private relief group Good Friends said last week.
Meanwhile, a separate survey of 524 North Korean defectors in South Korea found that 72.1 percent said they fled due to their homeland's dire economic situations, followed by those seeking a better life at 50.8 percent and those yearning to join South Korean society at 21.8 percent.
Nearly 22,000 North Koreans have defected to the South since the 1950-53 Korean War to avoid poverty and political oppression in their home country, data from the Unification Ministry showed.
When asked about unification, 56.7 percent said the main hurdle is China's opposition, while 38.7 percent cited North Korea's ongoing hereditary power transfer as a stumbling block, according to the survey. (Yonhap)
