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PYONGYANG WATCH
An appeal for North Korea's
children
By Aidan Foster-Carter
It's holiday time. Much of Asia, as well as the
West, is due for a well-earned break. Call it Christmas,
Hanuka, New Year, whatever; it's a chance to relax with
family and friends, eat and drink too much, or get away
from it all. Religious or not, we also tend to reflect,
and maybe resolve to live a little better.
Spare
a thought then, at this time above all, for the
long-suffering people of North Korea. Kim Jong-il's
earthly paradise is living proof - if you can call this
living - that the saying "things can only get better" is
a lie. For most people life is already miserable beyond
belief - and now it's going to get even worse. The
United Nations World Food Program's emergency report No
51 of 2002, released on Friday, warns:
"Without
immediate new contributions, WFP will be unable to reach
nearly 2.9 million vulnerable people with cereal
distributions from early in the new year. This number
includes: 760,000 children in nurseries, 385,000
children in kindergartens, 830,000 primary-school
children, 130,000 pregnant/nursing women, 550,000
elderly persons, and 225,000 caregivers in child
institutions and hospitals."
Yes, yet another
food crisis in North Korea. Despite the best harvest for
several years, this purported beacon of self-reliance is
still a million tons of grain short of feeding itself.
But the world is fed up with an unfed DPRK (Democratic
People's Republic of Korea), while new crises -
Afghanistan, southern Africa - compete for attention and
aid. After five years of getting most of what it
appealed for, this year WFP had resources to fulfill
only 70 percent of its planned operations. Next year, it
has appealed for US$225 million for 512,000 tons of food
for 6.4 million vulnerable people: almost a third of
North Korea's population. Yet pledges made so far total
a mere 33,000 tons.
Besides donor fatigue, blame
October's nuclear revelations. Neither the United States
nor Japan, major givers in the past, will now feed a
state defiantly pursuing a new bomb program and
threatening to restart its old one. South Korea,
especially under its radical new president-elect Roh
Moo-hyun, may prove kinder. Yet even there, dockers
recently refused to load rice for North Korea in protest
at the nuclear threat.
In terms of raison
d'etat, this is hardly surprising. As one Japanese
member of parliament said: "We send food, they send
missiles." And yet, as always, it's the innocent who
suffer. In his book The Great North Korea Famine,
Andrew Natsios criticized the US administration of
president Bill Clinton for linking its food aid to North
Korea to political goals. But now, as head of the US
Agency for International Development (USAID), he
declares: "We're drawing the line now with the North
Koreans."
To be clear what that means, let's
turn to another American. Rick Corsino, the WFP country
director in Pyongyang, laid it on the line in the
British daily The Guardian recently. (This and other
sources cited here can be found, as ever, on the
excellent ReliefWeb.org website under DPR Korea.) As he
put it:
"Since September, we have had to drop
nearly 3 million beneficiaries from our distribution
plans. Most of these are women and children ... They
rely on a public distribution system [PDS] that only
provides them with about half the ration for a refugee
in a camp, anywhere in the world." (The PDS ration, at
best, is a mere 300 grams daily - a cupful.) "This means
that, without our help, babies and children who are
moderately malnourished risk becoming severely
malnourished, and even more prone to sickness and
disease. Women will give birth to smaller babies, and
have less breast milk to feed them. It is what we call
the inheritance of hunger: a malnourished mother giving
birth to an underweight child who is pre-programmed to
underperform and underachieve. That is the stark reality
of North Korea today."
What's more, it's winter.
Not all of Asia swelters; nor is North Korea's winter
the kind you see on jolly Christmas cards. A UN report
in November noted that "heating in child institutions
appeared to be a serious problem ... Nutritional
improvements appear to be at risk as children must stay
in very cold rooms and are restricted in movement and
play. In west coast nurseries and kindergartens, meals
have been reduced to one main meal during the day for
young children aged six months to six years since WFP
cereal distributions were halted in November." Yet the
Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO)
consortium, to pressure Pyongyang, has suspended
fuel-oil shipments to North Korea: a move that will harm
the vulnerable, not the power elite.
Masood
Hyder, UN humanitarian coordinator for North Korea,
summed it all up in November already: "The food
situation is bad and rapidly getting worse. As of today,
3 million Koreans, women, children and the elderly, are
no longer receiving support from the WFP ... Soon there
will be no food for all 6 million that need our support.
We are running out of time. Water, health and sanitation
are all in need of urgent support. Basic drugs will run
out early in the new year ... Without continued
assistance all the gains of the past, all hopes for a
better future, will be dashed. A hungry child knows no
politics."
Raison d'etat be damned.
Please give whatever you can, and give now. Give to
whomever you choose: WFP, UNICEF, the Red Cross/Red
Crescent, or non-governmental organizations such as
Eugene Bell and Christian Friends of Korea (www.cfk.org)
who treat the sick. To hell with Kim Jong-il and his
stupid nukes. Shame him, and give.
(©2002 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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