The Worlds Biggest Refugee Camp

I'm in full agreeance with you Mick regarding banning all weapons and the hypocrisy that exists as we blindly follow the Bushwanker.
Never ever should we feel any sympathy for the most ruthless and evil of all leaders of our time.
I grew up with Fiona Terry, who was with MSF (now in Burma with the Red Cross). The below is part of an interview she did a few years ago.
"Look at North Korea. It is the example of the worst abuse of aid at the moment. Which is why in 1998 MSF pulled out. We just won't work there."
That's quite a call to make when it comes to a country that has lost an estimated two to three million people to famine; where a third of mothers continue to be assessed as malnourished and anaemic; and where 40% of children are considered to be chronically malnourished.
Kim Jong-il is criminally indifferent to the suffering of his own people and spends 43% of the state budget on the military but little on fuel. So in the -25°C winters, few houses or buildings are heated. As a result, the most common causes of death among children are diarrhoea and pneumonia.
Before the border crackdown, Terry interviewed hundreds of North Korean refugees as they risked all to cross into China. "When we talked to them, not one of them, not one, had ever been the recipient of food aid. The only time they've seen it is when it's being traded on the black market."
The "pretence" at assistance occurs because of the tight totalitarian control over everything, but most especially food distribution. In many ways, it has become the instrument of control.
What happens to western-donated food aid? According to Terry, the minute it arrives in North Korea, it goes into military warehouses. It's distributed to those North Koreans considered by the regime to be compliant. Foreign aid workers are not allowed to conduct independent monitoring. That means no spot visits to nutritional clinics, only staged events where westerners see happy chubby-cheeked children.
That contrasts with what MSF was reporting before 1998. As Terry says: "On the way back from these visits our people would see children on the side of the road, dressed in rags, with terrible skin and all the signs of severe malnourishment. When they pleaded with their North Korean minders to stop so they could help them, the reply was 'what children?' They don't exist."
Terry concedes that more recently the UN's World Food Program has periodically withheld food shipments in an attempt to negotiate better monitoring of food distribution to those in desperate need.
But she dismisses this as half-hearted at best. Her condemnation is total. "Food aid is being used in North Korea today to prop up a regime that perpetuates the famine and which decides on a daily basis who has the right to live and who can die. I ask, how is it acceptable for a humanitarian organisation to be part of that?"
...to read more http://www.msf.org.au/stories/twfeature/2003/006twf.shtml