But nonetheless

SEOUL, Aug. 30 (Yonhap) — Thousands of used but clean shirts, pants and other clothes are stacked in big heaps in warehouses outside Seoul to be sent to poverty-stricken North Korea.

But they can’t be sent as they are, because North Korean officials want to get them their way: all without English writing on them and their size no bigger than “large.”

“In addition, we have color restrictions,” Ahn Jeong-hui, director of the Korean Council for Reconciliation and Cooperation, the donor of the clothes and other relief goods. “Strong colors could easily repulse North Koreans.”

Whenever impoverished North Korea suffers from flood and other natural or man-made disasters, sympathetic South Korean civic organizations usually respond to their appeal for emergency aid with warm hearts.

While some requests are typical censorship, others reflects harsh reality

After years of dealing with North Korea, South Korean donors have learned that helping the communist country is not just about sending large quantities of supplies. It requires certain “customization,”

“The maximum size of clothes we send to North Korea is ‘large,’” said Hyun Il-hyun, secretary at Join Together Society, another South Korean relief agency, “We know anything bigger, like ‘extra large’ or ‘extra extra large,’ won’t fit North Koreans.”

“What will fit elementary school kids in South Korea will usually fit North Korean middle-schoolers,” she said. “Most North Korean adults will fit well into what South Korean teenagers wear.”

Chronic food shortages and malnutrition have stunted many North Koreans, making some look like dwarfs. Television footage broadcast in South Korea showed gaunt North Koreans scouring winter fields for grains left by reapers.

I realize a lot of people are sympathetic to the flood victims (which, to this date, the number is uncertain). However, no amount of aid is going to save the North Korean people.

Floodgates

About 30 North Korean defectors are seeking asylum in the United States, Radio Free Asia quoted a mission leader working with refugees as saying yesterday.

In an interview with the Wasington-based news channel, Rev. Cheon Ki-won of Durihana Mission said, “A second group of North Korean defectors will soon be entering the United States following the first six in May.”

Cheon did not specify the identities of the defectors or their current whereabouts.

“The number of (N.K. defectors) will be around 25 to 30,” Cheon said. He said he was not sure whether they would be arriving in the United States together or separately.

Andrei Lankov discusses the lack of broadcasting from outside sources in the North (Via. NKZone)

One might expect North Korea to be the target of many outside Korean-language stations. After all, it is one of the few despotic regimes whose survival still largely depends on myths about the country’s situation and its place in the world.

However, almost no outside broadcasting targets North Korea.

Until the mid-1990s, it didn’t make sense to broadcast to North Korea. Authorities since the 1960s had dealt with the “foreign broadcast problem”, which created so much trouble for other communist regimes, by outlawing all radios with free tuning. Radios sold in North Korea had fixed tuning and thus could receive only three or four official channels.

My suggestion? Podcasting.