Kim Jong-il, the North Korean
leader, bought $440m worth of weapons from Russia last month. Meanwhile at
home millions of his people are starving to death.
North Korea, the last bastion of Stalinism, is in the grip of an
economic crisis that has led to famine in much of the country. Yet the
1.1m-strong defence force has not had its budget cut. While monuments to
Kim Jong-il and his dead father, Kim Il-sung, are floodlit, apartment
blocks in the capital, Pyongyang, have no electricity.
Rural areas have abandoned tractors and reverted to ploughing by hand
or with livestock. Mercedes Benz cars belonging to the ruling elite ply
the streets of the capital, while ordinary citizens dig for edible plants
in the grass strips that line the five-lane boulevards. The public food
distribution system, on which three-quarters of the population depend,
only provides rations on important dates such as the birthdays of Kim
Il-sung or Kim Jong-il.
Extrapolations from testimonies of North Korean refugees in China
suggest that up to 3.5m people might have died from starvation and related
illnesses between 1995 and 1998. Reports of deaths continue to permeate
the border, although with less frequency: refugees say that the weakest
have already died.
Meanwhile North Korea receives one of the largest allocations of food
aid in the world - almost 1m tonnes a year. Mostly channelled through the
United Nations World Food Programme, it supposedly targets 8m of the most
vulnerable: children, pregnant and breast-feeding women, the elderly and
the sick. Yet refugees from the northern provinces where WFP concentrates
aid say that they never received this food.
No one knows what is happening to the food aid, not even the
organisations in charge of distributing it, because the North Korean
regime does not allow aid agencies the access necessary to ensure that aid
reaches those for whom it is intended. All aid is channelled through the
government-run public distribution system, effectively strengthening one
of the main instruments of control at the government's disposal.
Aid agencies are permitted to "monitor" the aid, but must announce
monitoring visits a week in advance. Aid workers have little contact with
ordinary North Koreans as a government interpreter accompanies them
everywhere, and questions deemed controversial are not translated.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) did try to overcome these restrictions.
But teams realised that the government fabricated whatever they wanted aid
workers to see: malnourished children when more food aid was desired, and
well-fed children when donors needed reassurance that aid was doing good.
Testimonies from refugees corroborate this: some report having carried
food from military storage facilities to nurseries before a UN visit,
others speak of being mobilised to dig up areas to exacerbate flood damage
in preparation for a UN inspection.
MSF began to understand that the North Korean government categorises
its population according to perceived loyalty and usefulness to the
regime, and those deemed hostile or useless were expendable. In 1996 Kim
Jong-il declared that only 30% of the population needed to survive to
reconstruct a victorious society. Unable to direct aid to the most needy,
MSF withdrew from North Korea in 1998.
Although they label their aid humanitarian, donor governments and aid
organisations keep North Korea on life support for political, economic and
diplomatic reasons. The United States, Japan and South Korea are pursuing
a "soft-landing" policy aimed at avoiding an implosion of the regime,
which could trigger military action or refugee flows into China and South
Korea. Food aid is aimed at opening dialogue and trust to pave the way for
reunification.
Most members of the European Union have re-established full diplomatic
relations with the regime, thereby bestowing legitimacy on Kim Jong-il and
his clique.
While political and diplomatic engagement provides the only real means
to influence the regime, using food aid to do so in a country beset by
famine is reprehensible. The purpose of humanitarian aid is to save lives.
By channelling it through the regime responsible for the suffering, it has
become part of the system of oppression.
Fiona Terry is a researcher for Médecins Sans Frontières
