Wherever they were, they probably were slowly dying. Because the country is facing a whopping grain shortfall of 2.1 million tons, most North Koreans now get rations of only 100 grams of rice per day. That’s a small handful, not enough to keep anyone alive for long. The government recently confirmed that 134 children died of malnutrition last year. According to U.S. intelligence reports, more than 100,000 could die this summer, and without a massive aid campaign, many times that number won’t live until the end of the year. “Is the rest of the world willing to let millions of North Koreans starve to death?” asks Bertini.
The rest of the world doesn’t know much about the North Korean famine, mostly because it isn’t on CNN. The picture on this page was taken by a member of a delegation led by Tony Hall, a Democratic congressman from Ohio who visited North Korea last week and described it as “rapidly descending into a hell of severe famine.” His group is one of the few that have been allowed to bear witness to the country’s desperate plight. The paranoid government has repeatedly denied visas to NEWSWEEK and other media to cover the disaster. That has made it harder for the World Food Program and other relief groups to dram up international sympathy for North Korea’s plight.
Many countries are loath to bail out the Pyongyang regime. After recent charges that North Korean agents kidnapped a young Japanese girl 20 years ago and spirited her away to Pyongyang, Tokyo has delayed sending any food aid, though the country has huge stores of surplus rice. South Korea has committed $6 million to the World Food Program’s emergency effort but wants political concessions from its old enemy before it will give large-scale bilateral aid. Washington has pledged $10 million which might buy a paltry 30,000 tons of grain, and is considering upping its contribution. But Defense Secretary William Cohen, who visited the demilitarized zone last week, also linked food aid to the progress of political talks. And Republicans in Congress have often berated the Clinton administration for “propping up” North Korea.
Humanitarian officials say that’s playing politics with innocent lives. But no one denies that the people really playing famine politics are North Korean government officials who want to hang on to their Stalinist system. The two greatest famines of the century took place in Ukraine in the 1950s and in China in the early 1960s, where the collective system of agriculture mined the harvests. The world knew the scope of those disasters only afterward. That, tragically, is just where North Korea is headed.
