Hunger Politics
(c) North Korea Genocide Exhibit
Contents
History of North Korea
Food as Politics
Nuclear Arms
International Aid
The Ethical and Practical Dilemmas of Food Aid
NKN Film & Photo
(c) UN Photo
HISTORY OF NORTH KOREA. Understanding North Korea’s human rights calamity requires an understanding of the extremism within which the state operates and a recognition of how North Korea came to be. Prior to its establishment in 1953, the Korean peninsula was consistently occupied by external, and often violent, powers. Most notably, Japanese annexation – beginning with the assassination of the last Korean Queen in 1895 and ending with the Second World War – dominated and exterminated Koreans who were murdered en-masse, tortured, forced to change their names and speak solely in Japanese, exploited for scientific experimentation, raped, and trafficked as sex slaves. This period consisted of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, leading to a near-economic collapse enjoining violence, poverty, and hunger.
Exploit continued after the Second World War as Soviet, Chinese, and U.S. superpowers used the Korean peninsula as a battlefield for ideology, geo-strategic positioning, and the assertion of power, also known as the Korean War. From this painful history of conflict and trauma and the perceived betrayal of the South, Kim Il Sung (North Korean dictator from 1948 until his death in 1994) was able to construct a national ideology of paranoid isolation and a want for self-reliance.
Dogmatic nationalism and the deification of Kim Il Sung however, soon became law. Public and private worship of Kim Il Sung – and then Kim Jong Il – was mandated, and defection was defined as any belief, action, or thought that deviated from the state-sanctioned standard. Opposition to the regime faced lifelong imprisonment. Living in North Korea came to entail the wholesale denial of basic and universally-affirmed human rights.
(c) UN Photo
Throughout the Korean War and into the 1980s, the Soviet Union supported Kim Il Sung and North Korea for several geo-strategic and political interests, including: North Korea’s pivotal location in East Asia and proximity to both China and Japan, and the want to expand communism globally. Thus, the Soviet Union financially and militarily supported North Korea against South Korea and the United States, and through its post-Korean War development. Late 1980s abandonment of North Korea by the Soviet Union led to North Korea’s economic disintegration as it lost half of its external assistance53 and the necessary and highly subsidized imports that were contributing to the domestic production of 70 percent of the country’s food stores.54 By 1998, North Korea’s economy recorded a negative growth rate for nine consecutive years, with some years plummeting in the double-digits.55 Internal threats of revolution that further threatened regime-collapse and heightened state extremism. Please click here for Photographs of the Aftermath of the Korean War.
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FOOD AS POLITICS. Kim Jong Il maintains the extreme policy of citizen control through torture, forced internment, and execution, arguably intensifying such regime-terror with denials of the right to food and death through starvation.
(c) North Korea Genocide Exhibit
Hagiwara Ryo, author and North Korea expert, argues that churning citizen dissatisfaction due to ongoing energy and food shortages after the Soviet collapse produced riots in Siniuju (1991) and an attempted coup in 1992. Ryo proposes that Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung feared execution by the “paeksong masses” as was the case in Romania, where Nicolae Andruţă Ceauşescu, communist Romanian dictator from 1974 until 1989, was executed by firing squad by the Romanian people. 56 Escalating dissent, particularly in North Korea’s northern provinces arguably led to a malignant policy for regime survival through “perpetual crisis management.”57 Grave restrictions on human freedom, selective mass-starvation of dissenters, and the creation of a nuclear crisis defined this policy.
According to Andrew Natsios, former Administrator of USAID, those that lived in the Northeastern Hamgyong provinces, where “loyalty to the center has always been weakest” due to unmonitored mountainous regions and proximity to the Chinese border, were cut off from national food distribution in 1994.58 Complete stoppages of publicly distributed food and enforced bans on movement out of the Northeastern Hamgyong province effectively established regional internment – or starvation – camps, targeting dissenting regions. [Back to top]
NUCLEAR ARMS. Kim Jong Il designed a dramatic nuclear crisis that transferred growing citizen dissatisfaction with the state to semi-wartime alertness and unification against a common foreign enemy.59 “This was a sly ploy of brinkmanship diplomacy in which the people’s growing frustrations against the government would be turned towards the U.S.”60 A male military draft mandating service for upwards of 13 years further disabled internal rebellion by isolating or executing defectors and dividing able-bodied men from the general populace.61 North Korea’s young adult population is required to serve in North Korea’s military, as Kim Jong Il attempts to disable and monitor able-bodied men and women to ensure their devotion to his regime. Thus, North Korea’s military is used to both maintain the country’s international defense power and national loyalty.
Table of North Korea’s Sources of Food Supply, indicating similar food supply levels with decreased commercial imports and government spending with international aid, 1990-2003 (c) Haggard and Noland, 2005
Nuclear confrontation also strategically welcomed international resources through foreign aid and nuclear talks. Chuck Downs, a staff member of the U.S. Department of Defense during the North Korean nuclear crisis asserts: “The nuclear ‘crisis’ of 1994 did not occur as a natural result of historical forces. Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il devised, created, thought up and implemented it so that they could extort money and benefits from the U.S in exchange for appearing to close down their nuclear program.”62 As such, from the mid-1990s, international food aid and nuclear disarmament aid seems to have stepped into North Korea where the Soviet Union stepped out. Widespread violations of human rights in the DPRK are thus intricately intertwined with North Korea’s global positioning; both enable Kim Jong Il to maintain control of the North Korean people in order to maintain the survival of the regime.
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INTERNATIONAL AID. “We stand before a huge ethical dilemma: Is it possible – and, if so, to what extent – to help starving North Koreans, whose fates depend on us a great deal more than on their government, if at the same time we are forever deceived and systematically blackmailed? An army armed with weapons of mass destruction is, to be sure, a permanent threat to the whole region. Let us recall that in the 1930s, Stalin unleashed a government-organized famine in Ukraine, the aim of which was to destroy the kulaks and to reinforce totalitarian power. In connection with the North Korean tragedy, we have therefore to pose the question whether through giving humanitarian aid we are at the same time reinforcing perhaps the worst political regime on the planet, a regime which is prepared to reinforce its power in the most drastic of means.” – Václav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic
Total humanitarian assistance to North Korea from 1996 to 2005 peaked in 2001 and totaled over $2.43 billion, not including informal aid and aid from China.63 From 1995 to 2003, formal assistance to North Korea from the U.S. alone reached over $1 billion.64 Food aid in North Korea, however, is ineffective because of direct food diversion and restrictions that North Korea places on aid organizations. The North Korean regime explicitly diverts aid from communities in-need to non-vulnerable communities or to the state. This practice further indicates North Korea’s use of foreign aid to maintain its hunger policies and regime-survival.
Table of Total Humanitarian Assistance to North Korea, 1996-2004 (c) Haggard and Noland, 2005
(c) WFP/Gerald Bourke 2003
North Korea experts and economists Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland estimate in their comprehensive study of the DPRK that upwards of 30 percent and perhaps even 50 percent of international aid is diverted.65 In 2008 for example, South Korea reported that the North was distributing international rice aid to its military rather than to its hungry population.66 Other examples of diversion include the attainment and selling of food aid by elite members of North Korean society, or by the state. While the frequency of these sales cannot be determined, such diversion has been established through North Korean video footage and photographs.67 A survey of nearly 1,000 North Korean refugees found that over ten years into the international aid effort, approximately 40 percent of respondents (likely from areas of high food-insecurity) reported to have had absolutely no knowledge that foreign humanitarian food aid even existed, even though the international aid effort had been occurring for over ten years and such aid allegedly targets all school-aged children in the country.68 Of this sampling, less than 5 percent of respondents reported receipt of international aid.69 Moreover, this sampling explains that much of the minimal aid that was distributed was labeled as coming from Kim Jong Il, rather than from the international community.70 These false representations of food sources further indicate that the North Korean state uses food as propaganda and as a means of ensuring state control.
(c) WFP/Lena Savelli 2008
Therefore, international experts are unsure as to whether North Korea’s most vulnerable communities – the targets of aid programs – are receiving aid due to restrictions on aid organizations. Obstructed in their access and unable to monitor households, distribution sites, and certain regions of the state, relief programs have no choice but to generalize the vulnerability of populations based on demographic indicators rather than absolute need.71 Children, pregnant women, and the elderly for example, have been logically identified as vulnerable; as such, distribution centers exist within hospitals and schools. While these are somewhat effective and pragmatic venues of outreach, the limitations imposed by the North Korean state impede aid programs from identifying and targeting other vulnerable persons who may not interact with such facilities. These groups may include: the rural poor, those of the “hostile class” (i.e. alleged “defectors” and family members of defectors) who are denied access to hospitals and schools, the many orphaned or abandoned children housed in hidden institutions, and those imprisoned in North Korea’s internment camps.72 [Back to top]
THE ETHICAL AND PRACTICAL DILEMMAS OF FOOD AID. There are several dilemmas in giving food aid to North Korea, most of which revolve around one key question: Should food aid be given to a country with hostile foreign policies and a dismal human rights record? The following points address some of the dilemmas surrounding this fundamental question.
- Will food aid strengthen Kim Jong Il’s regime? Feeding the development of a rogue state seems antithetical to the advancement of human rights. In many cases, such support may exacerbate human rights violations and already-unchecked state power. Providing long-term development aid to the DPRK and securing key sectors of the state’s infrastructure, economy, and food production will certainly strengthen Kim Jong Il’s regime73 - a regime that Václav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic, refers to as the “worst political regime on the planet.” 74 C ritics argue that: “aid to North Korea serves to prop up the current regime,”75 as “the money saved is then spent on the North’s military establishment and on its nuclear program”76 – a program that translates into powerful international collateral. Despite North Korea’s food deficits, the DPRK has refused to reduce its defense fund. Approximately 25 percent of North Korea’s national income maintains it’s military; this is striking in comparison to the 5 percent of South Korea’s much larger GNP reserved for its defense budget.77 Even through the apex of its famine in 1998, North Korea’s military expenditures remained at 15 to 30 percent of its GNP.78 Heavy and long-term reliance on international emergency food aid and the failure to implement domestic policies to alleviate persistent hunger question the budgetary allocations and priorities of the North Korean government. Through the exploitation of international generosity, the DPRK has managed a policy of re-directing its national capital that would – and should – be spent on food purchases into military and nuclear investments.79 In this way, lives are leveraged by the DPRK as international commodities for which hunger and starvation are its exploits.
- Does food aid decrease local accountability and state responsibility? Does food aid expense resources at the cost of political forms of accountability that underlie the prevention of famine? Alex de Waal, British famine and Africa expert, thinks so.80 Similarly, Randall Ireson, North Korea analyst, advocates for long-term development aid, rather than short-term emergency aid, explaining: “Food aid has had no effect on the North Korean production system, whether industrial or agricultural. It is expensive, but because it does not contribute to any lasting security, it can be manipulated as a tool to further donor nations’ political agendas.”81
- Despite the DPRK’s willful antagonism towards the international community and the potential for aid to decrease local accountability, should the international community continue to assist the North Korean people and government? According to Alex de Waal, “[i]t is morally unacceptable to allow people to suffer and die on the grounds that relieving their suffering will support an obnoxious government or army.” That is, in considering the dilemma of food aid in North Korea, the world community should distinguish supporting a nation’s people versus the actions of its government, between the life-deserving populace and the non-deserving state. Despite North Korea’s incomplete cooperation with international aid efforts and the potential long-term implications of aid, there is no question that action must be taken in support of the North Korean people.
- Does the international community “waste” food aid on North Korea when other, “grateful governments” would welcome assistance and try to efficiently distribute such aid? In offering aid to non-accommodating states where diversion rates are high, the aid industry naturally wonders if it would be more effective to offer such relief to cooperative or “grateful” governments – if this might save more lives. Indeed, international aid organizations and their respective donors seem divided on this issue, as evidenced by both the departure and continuance of relief and aid work in the DPRK.
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