EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fourth in a week-long series of excerpts from Rogue State: How a Nuclear North Korea Threatens America by William C. Triplett, which as released Monday. The first installment of this series can be read here, the second here, and the third here.
Jane Harman is a hard-working congresswoman from California who is now the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Her district is filled with American defense contractors and she has served on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees of the House. She has made it her business to know and understand military and intelligence matters.
In August 1997, she made a trip to North Korea to examine the progress of the international aid program. Stopping in Seoul on her return she told a news conference of her concern that “some food aid has probably ended up in the hands of the [North Korean] military and the other elite.”
In less than a day, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s press spokesman, Jamie Rubin, was expressly denying Harman’s concern. “I can say that our experts are confident that there is no significant diversion of the assistance we have provided,” Rubin told the press.
What Mr. Rubin did not know was that exactly as he was speaking, a U.S. military team inspecting a captured North Korean submarine was finding the remains of tinned food provided by an American church from Virginia. The label on the cans read “Food for Relief, in the name of Christ” and “Donatable food, not for resale.” The North Korean submarine had run aground off the east coast of South Korea. Half the crew committed suicide and the other half engaged in a shootout with the South Korean Army and police. By the time it was over, twenty-four North Korean commandoes and fourteen South Koreans were dead. The single surviving commando told authorities his team was on a military reconnaissance and rehearsal mission to probe South Korean defenses.
INTERNATIONAL AID TO KIM’S RESCUE
Here was clear evidence that international food aid to North Korea was being diverted to the military. This leads to some questions about the realities of the North Korean famine and the international food aid that was sent to save the North Korean people.
Was there a famine in North Korea from 1995-1998? Yes, although some observers, including the CIA, doubted it at the time. There is now enough physical evidence of malnourished children to confirm the reports from refugees. The best estimate is that two to three million people died of starvation and diseases related to malnutrition.
Were the reports of people resorting to cannibalism credible? Yes. Refugees streaming into Manchuria reported this. Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz obtained a confirmatory Top Secret American intelligence document, which he included in an appendix to his book Betrayal.
What was the cause of the famine? Only about 20 percent of North Korea’s land is suitable for agriculture. Communist-style collectivization and mismanagement made the situation worse. Prior to 1990, North Korea was exchanging its low-quality industrial goods with China and the Soviet Bloc for food at subsidized prices. When that ended, famine was almost inevitable.
How did the North Korean government respond to the food crisis? Kim Jung Il ensured that the military and the Communist elite were fed and left the rest of the population to fend for themselves. The North Korean government then appealed for international food aid under the excuse of a natural disaster–severe flooding. While there was some truth to that claim, the famine was mostly man-induced. The Imjin River runs through the DMZ to the sea on the western side. Standing on the south bank of the river, in South Korea, and looking across the river into North Korea, one immediately notices that the northern bank and the hills beyond have been completely stripped of trees and shrubs. This kind of practice has led to extreme environmental damage in North Korea and loss of agriculture.
What was the international response to the North Korean famine? The World Food Program, an arm of the United Nations, organized an international program that included major donations from the United States, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union. The World Food Program is currently soliciting donations for 2003-2004.
Was it necessary for the North Koreans to seek international aid? A high-ranking North Korean defector reported that the Dear Leader spent almost a billion dollars on a Memorial Hall glorifying his dead father. These sorts of projects continued unabated throughout the worst of the famine. In 1996, the Agency for International Development, an arm of the State Department, hired an experienced researcher, Sue Lautze, to examine the food situation in North Korea. She traveled over much of the country including the border region. When her draft report concluded that the Kim regime had the foreign currency reserves to pay for its own food imports but that these financial reserves had been spent on weapons instead, the State Department, then headed by Secretary Albright, ordered a revision of the report before releasing it.
Was the international food aid diverted for illicit purposes? The diversion of international food aid in North Korea is much more serious than a few cans of American food found in a submarine. The World Food Program lacked any management or control of the distribution. In 1998 a number of highly respected international aid groups, including Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) and the International Federation of Red Cross Societies, “decided not to supply any food aid to the communist state because this food had often been turned over to the military of its own use.” In one instance, the North Korean military commandeered five thousand tons of food aid at gun point right in front of WFP officials. In 2001 another UN agency, the UN Commission on Human Rights, received a damning report from Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, stating that it “gradually became clear that most of the international aid was being diverted by the army, the secret services, and the [North Korean] government.”
A North Korean army defector has pointed out just how easy it was to fool the WFP. He told a South Korean magazine that because of the “military-first” policy, the KPA has carte blanch for whatever it wants at the ports.61 His unit simply put on civilian clothes and changed from military to civilian license plates whenever the WFA inspectors were around. “Since South Korean rice was of high quality, it all went to high-ranking figures,” he said with regard to a 1999 shipment. The defector recalls that, “Soldiers also ate all of that rice. North Korea is based on military-first politics….There is no need to pay attention to the residents.”
There is also the question of whether North Korea became a food exporter during this famine period. A Japanese visitor to the Kim palaces reports seeing a letter of thanks for food aid donated to an African country. There were also unconfirmed rumors of North Korea trading food for arms.
What effect did the famine have on the Kim family and its supporters? Almost none at all. In the summer of 2003 the memoirs of the Dear Leader’s Japanese chef were published in Japan. The chef revealed that Kim and his children (who were known as “Princes” and “Princesses”) continued to live the high life while his subjects starved. His menu includes the most expensive delicacies from around the world. He had 40,000 bottles of imported wine in his cellars. When his jet ski wasn’t fast enough, he ordered a bigger and faster one. When he wanted to get around one of his extensive estates, he just picked out a Honda motorcycle from a catalogue and it appeared as if by magic. For entertainment there was fishing, horseback riding, bowling, billiards, satellite TV, and films in the private screening rooms.
The Communist elite did all right as well. The Korean Bar-B-Que restaurants in Pyongyang were constantly filled. An American observer noted that a high school for the elite had healthy children “comparable with those in South Korea or Japan.”
Some of the food aid did manage to find its way to children and average North Koreans. But substantially fewer North Koreans received aid than the World Food Program claims.
What did communist China do during the famine? The communist Chinese were total opportunists in this tragedy. They refused to cooperate with the UN so no one really knows how much food aid they actually gave. China secretly admitted to the UN that their aid was specifically designed to keep the North Korean military happy so they would not overthrow the Kim dynasty.
Did the international relief effort moderate North Korean behavior? No. The international food aid program and North Korean aggression against others existed in parallel universes. While the massive effort to help the North Korean people was in full swing, the following occurred:
‐The North Korean secret uranium enrichment program prospered
The amount of physical and mental suffering that occurred during the North Korean famine is more than we can really imagine. A substantial portion of the older generation simply disappeared. An American observer passing through a North Korean city noted the total absence of older or even middle-aged people. The reason? Grandparents and parents had given their rations to their children while they, themselves, either starved to death or died of malnutrition-related illnesses. When they could get it, people drowned themselves in alcohol.
Sadly, it may be that the international food aid program saved the North Korean regime at a moment when it was most vulnerable. If there had been no international food aid at all or if the United Nations officials had demanded openness and an equitable distribution for the food, Kim’s regime may have collapsed. Andrew Natsios, the American administrator of the Agency for International Development, offers the following analysis:
Had the ration even in these very lean years been evenly distributed among the entire population, people might have been able to use their coping mechanism to avoid famine. Such an egalitarian ration, however, would have shaken the tenuous foundations of the state. It would have caused panic among the party cadres, internal security apparatus, and the military who might have seen themselves starving as the rest of the population did, and it was on these three groups that the survival of the Kim dynasty depended.
But the UN made no such demands. Likewise, the Clinton administration did not demand an end to North Korean aggression as a condition for sending American food aid, nor did it pressure the Chinese to use their leverage on Pyongyang. By utter ruthlessness in Pyongyang, aided by weakness in Washington and at the UN, Kim’s regime remained in place. The hypocrisy continues today. In the fall of 2003, an American government official had a meeting with a senior North Korean diplomat in New York. His mission was to try to persuade Pyongyang to be more open on the distribution of recent shipments of international food aid to North Korea. The North Korean diplomat dismissed him with contempt. Nothing has changed.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Coming Friday: “Democracy and Human Rights”
–William C. Triplett, a national-security expert, is the author of Rogue State: How a Nuclear North Korea Threatens America.