Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Communists. "These Russians," he repeats, "gave the people something to do." While Park II Woo's security police were busy pumping bullets into the necks of Pyongyang's leading Christian "white ones," his People's Building Administration was busy throwing up large, Russian-style housing developments for Communist Party members. Between 1947 and 1950 the price of rice in Pyongyang almost quadrupled. "Every time the price of rice went up another ten won," said a Pyongyang "radish" last week, "the government would announce a new housing project, a new hospital plan or a new wing...
Trucks & a Teacher. Last week, two weeks after Pyongyang's liberation from the dual rule of the Russians and Kim II Sung, the people of the city had nothing to do. In the city hall, a former schoolteacher went falteringly about the business of pretending he was mayor. Two rickety sound trucks wheezed about the streets alternately playing martial music and exhorting the citizenry to get their city running again. But there was no evidence that anyone in town had any idea of what to do next or how to do it. Almost everyone who had held a position...
...improvised Provisional City Council, appointed during the first days of liberation, was still nominally in office, but the real work of running the city was in the hands of bluff, vigorous U.S. Colonel Charles R. Munske. Colonel Munske makes it clear that he is not in Pyongyang as a military governor. He is commander of a U.S. Civil Assistance Team, which seems to be the title given by the U.S. Army to a military government unit whose existence it doesn't want to admit...
...military government officers in North Korea, Munske's work is complicated by a high-level snafu. U.S. Civil Assistance Teams have been given no clearly defined political objectives, and each team is theoretically responsible only to the U.S. tactical commander in its area. In the Pyongyang area the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team is trying to set up local administration in the small communities around the city. The airborne officers are working hard, but they are not trained for the work, and it seems doubtful that their efforts will have any lasting effect...
...appalling fact is that, although the U.S. and U.N. have known from the start what North Korea's political problems would be, we have come in almost completely unprepared to deal with them. Perhaps things will improve in time, but meanwhile the people of Pyongyang and of the rest of North Korea are dreadfully confused...