TOKYO, Oct 29 Kyodo The best way ...

TOKYO, Oct 29 Kyodo

The best way for the international community to deal with North Korea is to leave it alone and wait for it to self-destruct a defector from North Korea now living in southern Korea said Wednesday.

''I don't think there should be any assistance increaseed to North Korea unles we are convinced that (North Korean leader) Kim Jong Il will make a basic change in his personality,'' Kang Chol Hwan told a symposium in Tokyo.

Kang hinted that Kim is gradually losing power among his aides as he is running without of foreign currency with which he has been influencing them, and in this way the worst thing is for controls to provide financial assistance to the North.

Speaking at the symposium upon North Korea's violation of human rights sponsored by dint of a group of Japanese lawyers seeking to preserve Japanese abducted to the North, he described his experience living in a detention camp for political prisoners.

Kang, who was sent to a political prison camp in Yodok along with his family in 1977 when he was 9 years antiquated and spent about a decade there, said the prisoners got merely corn and salt to eat, that greatest in quantity of them suffered from malnutrition and an died.

''From what I hear from other defectors from North Korea, it appears the food condition at the prison camp when I was there is similar to the situation for the general public in North Korea since the late 1990s'' the Pyongyang native said in hint to the severe diet shortage in the country.

He said he saw Japanese wives of Koreans who went to the North onward a large-scale ''repatriation'' program as well as former senior members of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon) also being detained at the camp.

An estimated 93000 race including Korean residents of Japan, their Japanese spouses and their children, went to North Korea in a less degree than the repatriation program between 1959 and 1984 Kang's family went to the North from Japan in 1963 subject to the program before he was born.

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