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SEOUL: North Korea has asked China to provide massive food aid for
its hungry people amid a flare-up in tensions with former major
donor South Korea, a news report said Friday.
“This means the North won’t look to the
South for food aid, at least for a while,” Seoul’s Hankyoreh
newspaper quoted a diplomatic source as saying. “China has not
yet responded to this request.”
A leading analyst also said the North’s leader
was likely to turn to his traditional ally.
“Following the April 18 to 19 US-South Korea
summit, Kim Jong Il is likely to visit China to strengthen their
traditional alliance as ‘brotherly neighbors’ and request
massive food aid,” Professor Yang Moo Jin of the University of
North Korean Studies told AFP.
In recent years, the impoverished hard-line
communist state has received around 400,000 tons of rice and about
300,000 tons of fertilizer a year from the prosperous South.
But the North is furious about the decision by
Seoul’s new conservative government to link economic assistance
to progress in nuclear disarmament.
The North, which relies on international help
to feed many of its people, accepted aid and investment worth
billions of dollars from South Korea through a decade-long
“sun-shine” engagement policy under liberal presidents.
Its party newspaper Rodong Sinmun, in an article
blasting President Lee Myung Bak as a traitor and US sycophant, said
this week it no longer needs Seoul’s help.
“The DPRK (North Korea) will be able to live
as well as it wishes without any help from the South, as it did in
the past,” it said.
Seoul officials say the North has made no
request for rice or fertilizer this year despite its increasingly
severe food shortage.
-- AFP
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