WASHINGTON—I write to you not as a fellow Korean but as a fellow world citizen living in the 21st century.
First, I must tell you about myself so that you know that I have been a distant observer.
Although I was born in Taejeon, South Korea, I grew up in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania.
Now in 2011, I hear about atrocities in my former country. I hear of gulags holding 200,000 men, of women who are political prisoners and, I hear of famine and starving. At the same time, your government recently asked for food aid, again. But NGO leaders, your fellow North Koreans, policy experts and researchers question whether you really need the aid, and whether you would deliver the food to those who really need it.
Many of them suspect the food is being diverted to the military and being sold in order to sustain the totalitarian regime. Yet earlier this year, North Korea ordered all its foreign embassies to appeal to their host governments for food aid, according to the Guardian Newspaper.
The United States and South Korea are currently considering whether to respond to North Korea’s entreaties. At the Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C. this week, a panel of experts debated whether Washington and Seoul should provide extensive food aid to North Korea.
The panel of experts acknowledged that the need is real. The debate is not that conditions in North Korea are abysmal but about the problem with its government.
“Pyongyang’s refusal to implement economic reform and its belligerence against the very countries from which it seeks aid should preclude it from receiving large-scale aid,” said Bruce Klingner, a senior research fellow of the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.
“The country’s problems are systemic, brought on by its state-run economic system and resistance to reform.”
Walter Lohman, Director of Asian Studies Center agreed: “There is no doubt that people in North Korea are suffering. None of us are unsympathetic to their plight, but they are victims of their own government.”
In March the World Food Program, in conjunction with the Food Agriculture Organization and the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, traveled widely across the North Korean peninsula, visiting 40 counties in 11 provinces, surveying households, examining granaries and studying nutrition rates. They released their findings in the Rapid Food Security Assessment report (RFSA), which stated, “More than six million vulnerable people are in urgent need of international food assistance.”
Since 1995 the United States has provided North Korea with over $1 billion in assistance, about 60 percent of which has paid for food aid and 40 percent for energy, according to a Congressional Research Service report in 2008. The aid was suspended that year due to a lack of transparency in the distribution and the escalating tensions after the North’s nuclear and missile tests.
The experts said that, although it is difficult to quantify how much international food aid has been diverted to the military, North Korea has repeatedly imposed restrictions on inspectors that have hindered accurate monitoring. The Heritage Foundation reported that even after inspectors observed proper distribution, the military would recoup food after the monitors departed.
Experts say strict verification of where aid is flowing to is a minimum requirement and that the North Korean government needs to affirm to its commitment to monitoring accords.
“Pyongyang’s acceptance of an intrusive verification system should be an absolute prerequisite to any U.S. consideration of providing food aid,” Klingner said in a memo published by The Heritage Foundation on its website.
“I am for food aid as long as there is strict monitoring,” said Suzanne K. Scholte, founder and chairman of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, who has led the North Korea human rights movement since 1996.
“We know for a fact that there was a serious diversion,” said Sholte.
She added that some of the aid given previously may have “exacerbated the problem by relieving the pressures of the North Korean regime.” Sholte also cited the actions of Doctors Without Borders and Action Against Hunger, two organizations who worked closely with her in North Korea in the early 2000’s but left the country in protest because they saw that food was not going to the people who needed it most.
“We ended up providing aid that kept the regime in power,” said Sholte.
The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) recently announced plans to launch an emergency food nutrition operation to feed the most vulnerable 3.5 million people in North Korea.
“The operation will include the highest standards of monitoring and control to ensure that food gets to where it is needed,” the WFP recently said in a press release.
Eun Hae Jo, 20, has mixed sentiments. While she is glad that some help is being given to her fellow citizens in dire conditions, at the same time she remains skeptical.
Jo, now a Virginian resident and a student, successfully escaped North Korea in 2006. In North Korea she was trapped in ‘Guhoso’- or orphanage—not because she was an orphan but because she was being punished for her family’s previous attempts to escape North Korea.
While her parents were punished in concentration camps, Jo, being a minor, was sent to a Guhoso but endured long hours of forced labor with only very little food, consisting mostly of soups.
During her time in the Guhoso, everyone was always hungry, Jo said. They were fed three times a day but each meal small enough to fit in her palm. She never once ate white rice, a basic Korean staple, yet saw many empty burlap bags in the construction sites that she was forced to work at.
“I personally don’t think that the U.S. should provide the aid unless it can know for sure where it’s going,” she said.
