He has taken a country blessed with natural resources and an educated populace and reduced it to the level of a third- world country. He has assassinated foreign statesmen, blown up civilian airlines and sold weapons to terrorists. He is diverting resources that his country cannot spare to accelerate a program whereby he can become a nuclear power. He has surrounded himself with sycophants and lives in hedonistic luxury. Who is this strange person? He is Kim Jong II, ruler of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea-or North Korea.
There were good and sufficient reasons for President George W Bush to declare North Korea a charter member of the "Axis of Evil." 'Separated At Birth' explores North Korea's twentieth-century history, its separation from South Korea, as well as its place in the East and its relation to China, the US, and Japan.
