Hunger in North Korea

Here’s a little exercise in accountability.  There can be no national government that cares less about its people than North Korea.  It’s starvation season there for North Koreans not in the government so the well fed Kim Jong-Il is begging for help again.

North Korea has long since grown dependent on food handouts from its estranged brother, South Korea, and from the United States.  But the South’s current president has taken a tougher line, tying assistance to less provocative behavior by Kim Jong-Il’s nuclear-tipped regime.

International critics of the North Koreans complain about the lack of transparency there.

·         Diplomats and foreign-aid staff are restricted in where they may travel.

·         South Korea says that the North is hoarding 1 million tons of rice, playing up a shortfall in order to get aid on the cheap.

·         Some say Mr Kim wants the aid in order to announce a bumper harvest in 2012.  Something approaching paradise has long been promised to North Koreans for 2012, the 100th anniversary of North Korea’s founder, Kim’s father.

·         The South also suspects North Korea of exaggerating its troubles in order to shift focus from denuclearization, last year’s shelling of Yeonpyeong Island and the sinking of a naval corvette.

·         An activist network in the South says that the price of rice in the black market has actually fallen by around half in recent months.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter and other aid organizations who visited Pyongyang recently, say the fault lies with South Korea and the United States.  The hungry must be fed.  Tying government behavior to aid is wrong.  It’s even wrong for providers to demand transparency:

·         We wish to tour the country – as we do everywhere else in the world – to gather data about need.

·         We wish to monitor that the food goes to the hungry and not to the government.

·         We’d like to have a role in policies that might make North Korea less dependent.

It is past time for all non-emergency American aid to come with some basic strings – such as transparency.  When a government will not allow independent verification of need and distribution of aid, then the consequences are on that government.  Let the emergency of starving masses first soften the hearts of the unrelenting, rogue regime and its military. 

These principals should go double for hostile governments and redoubled for those that threaten their neighbors with weapons of mass destruction and their proliferation to other rogue states.

As for Jimmy Carter, this singularly stupid man cannot be recalled to his maker soon enough.

Jimmy Carter Blasts U.S. for Withholding Food Aid to N. Korea

Fox News, April 28, 2011

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/04/28/carter-n-korea-wants-guarantees-nukes/#ixzz1NOMpVIsS

The Politics of Hunger in a Brutal Place

Economist, May 12th 2011

http://www.economist.com/node/18682803?story_id=18682803