Gulag

North Korea, smaller than the size of the state of Mississippi, has the most political prisoners in the WORLD.  The genocide in Darfur, so tragic, has something like 400,000 victims.  Scholars guess that in the 90's in North Korea, 2 to 3 million people died from starvation.

The peak of the famine was around 1996.

Fifteen years ago.  I wonder if my uncles would have been alive then, and if they, in their seventies, already stooped over from decades of poor nutrition, in their sunset years, couldn't move south to the sunshine, but instead, if they starved to death.  My dad's big brothers.  I wonder if they married and had children.  They might have been grandfathers.  I wonder if they saw their grandbabies die, their ribs stretched over by grey skin

while Kim Jong-Il was drinking Hennessy cognac, watching DVDs, talking to his sons in Europe.  Maybe being driven around in his Mercedes, surveying his kingdom of starving children foraging for bugs and twigs.