Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Saturday, Nov. 1, 2003

That is the thrust of remarks Friday by the highest ranking defector from Communist North Korea. He says the regime of Kim Jong Il never did abide by the unverifiable 1994 nuclear agreement with the Clinton administration.

"People do not use nuclear weapons to use them as toys," Hwang Jang-Yop told a Capitol Hill luncheon Friday.

"They have always lied about it, and they continue to develop nuclear programs," he warned a Defense and Policy Forum of the Defense Forum Foundation.

What's more, the food the U.S. sent to North Korea, ostensibly for the starving people there, actually went to the military. What was left over was sold on the marketplace, he added.

The onetime insider in the North Korean government said he could not answer "to the extent of my knowledge" the question as to which country was the "target" of the nuclear buildup there. President Bush has named North Korea as a part of the "axis of evil."

Hwang drew sustained applause when he said North Korea's brutal Stalinist dictator and his government "should be eliminated."

Speaking through an interpreter, he called for organized resistance from people within and outside of North Korea -- a nation often described as one big prison -- to hasten the demise of the Communist holdout regime.

"It is not a question of whether [North Korea's government] will collapse," he added, "but what we can do to make it collapse faster." He said resistance inside North Korea would be greatly helped by "pro-democratic" organizations outside the country-particularly in South Korea and the United States.

Hwang said such minimal reforms as may have been implemented by Kim Il Jong's iron fist rule do not indicate a softening of his grip on the country, but only an attempt to postpone or sidetrack the inevitable revolt.

"Why else would one think [the North Korean government] would allow [slight] reform?" he asked.

Communist dictator Kim Il Jong believes the Eastern European nations were able to throw off the yoke of Soviet domination in the late eighties because they had softened their clamp-down and lost control. "Control" is the key word, Hwang said. Kim is determined not to make the same mistake.

Among the other points the defector made: