N.Korea Energy Shortages Worsen

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N.Korea Energy Shortages Worsen By SANG-HUN CHOE, Associated Press Writer

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Energy shortages have gotten so bad in North Korea that tourists staying in first-class hotels have had to sleep with their coats on, South Korean officials said Saturday.

The episode is yet another indication that North Korea's energy shortages are getting worse in its fifth year of a hunger crisis caused by bad weather and a botched collective farm system.

A U.S.-led consortium, called the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, is building two modern reactors and providing 500,000 tons of fuel oil annually in return for a freeze on the North's nuclear program. Before the freeze, North Korea was suspected of using its Soviet-designed reactors to build materials for atomic bombs.

When KEDO delegates visited Pyongyang in February, they had to wear their coats during a dinner party and went to bed with clothes on at a first-class hotel in Pyongyang that was not heated, said Choi Yong-joon, an official at Seoul's Unification Ministry.

North Korea recently acknowledged that an acute electricity shortage was disrupting its already weak industries.

U.S. Ambassador Charles Kartman and North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan discussed how to ease the North's shortages during their weeklong meeting in New York earlier this month.

North Korea demands compensation for delays in building the two KEDO reactors. It says if it had built its own reactors as scheduled, its power problem would not be so serious.

Fearful that North Korea was developing nuclear weapons, Washington signed a 1994 pact with Pyongyang under which the North agreed to freeze its nuclear program.

In return, the consortium of U.S., Japanese and South Korean partners agreed to build two 1,000-megawatt reactors worth $4.6 billion that cannot be used for military purposes. However, delays have plagued the project.

Under the 1994 accord, the United States promised to build the first light-water reactor by 2003. Now officials say privately that a delay of several years is inevitable.

http://www.newsday.com/ap/international/ap559.htm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), March 26, 2000


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