NORTH
KOREA AND THE POLITICS OF
FAMINE PART 4: A matter of
policy By John Feffer
(See also PART 1: Failure in the fields -
click here PART 2: Human
rights violations - click here PART 3: A
question of reform - click here)
Some
have argued that Pyongyang's broad-spectrum
violation of human rights justifies a suspension
of all efforts at engagement, including food aid,
in favor of government isolation and
destabilization.
Medecins Sans Frontieres
researcher Fiona Terry wrote in The
Guardian in 2001: "The
purpose of humanitarian aid is to save lives. By
channeling it through the regime responsible for
the suffering, it has become part of the system of
oppression." [117] Others, including Stephan
Haggard and Marcus Noland, advise the continuation
of food aid but under altered conditions linked to
"political change" in the country. [118] Those
humanitarian organizations that still operate in
North Korea - even as they shift to development as
demanded recently by the North Korean government -
have continued to favor some form of engagement
and have avoided any discussion of sensitive
topics related to internal political change.
The critical question is whether food
policy - both within North Korea and toward it by
outsiders - requires policy change or political
change. The former position suggests that the
current North Korean government should continue
with some manner of economic reform, that the
international community should not add
contingencies to food assistance, and that the
changes that occur in these spheres will be
largely technocratic: a mechanism might be
improved, a reform might be fine-tuned. This has
generally been the approach taken by humanitarian
organizations.
The latter position of
advocating political change suggests that a more
thoroughgoing transformation is required in North
Korea to guarantee its citizens the right to food.
Haggard and Noland argue that "only political
change" can "guarantee a North Korea free from
hunger". [119] Moreover, they add, the lack of
sufficient food is "directly" related to other
human-rights violations, namely freedom of
expression and freedom to organize. [120] If this
latter position is taken, foreign governments
might insist on attaching political conditions to
economic assistance. North Korea, for instance,
might not be able to secure substantial
development assistance without first dismantling
its prison-camp system.
Policy change
might suggest internal linkages, such as tighter
food-monitoring systems. Political change suggests
external linkages, such as making economic
assistance contingent on improvements in civil and
political rights. Policy change involves
negotiating civilly and respecting North Korean
sovereignty; political change requires undermining
that sovereignty.
The era of humanitarian
aid to North Korea may well be over, given
Pyongyang's announcement late last year that it is
now only soliciting development assistance and is
asking all humanitarian organizations to leave the
country. But the issue of policy change versus
political change remains relevant. Many of the
concerns around monitoring and transparency will
inevitably carry over to the development era.
Indeed, in this new phase, foreign donors will
have much greater opportunities for influencing
the course of reform, since contingencies can
apply to more than simply monitoring or
transparency. [121] Many of the criticisms
regarding multilateral aid and NGO
(non-governmental organization) assistance are
already being applied to South Korean food aid,
which, except for a brief period this year,
continues to flow into the North. Calls for more
thoroughgoing political change within North Korea
have by no means disappeared; in some quarters
they have intensified, particularly after the July
missile launches.
External linkage has
generally been successful in other contexts when
foreign governments are working in conjunction
with a domestic constituency pressing for
political change from within. The classic case is
the anti-apartheid movement's coordination with
the African National Congress to link economic
trade to political change within South Africa.
Other examples might include the US government's
destabilization of Chile in the early 1970s -
undertaken with the support of the Chilean
military and business class - or the current
campaign against Myanmar's military junta
undertaken in collaboration with Aung San Suu
Kyi's National League for Democracy.
However, external linkage in the absence
of strong domestic support in the target country
has not had much effect. This was the case with
the Soviet Union in the 1970s and China in the
1990s. External linkage also faces the
"cat-herding" problem. For example, Washington was
unable to persuade US grain traders to submit to a
coordinated policy toward the Soviet Union.
Similarly, it will be difficult to persuade US
corporations to accept limitations on trade with
China in the case of the (yet to be introduced)
Scoop Jackson National Security and Freedom Act of
2005, which would set limits on US trade with
China, if Beijing doesn't change its policy of
returning refugees to North Korea. Moreover, it is
very hard to support external linkages with
respect to food assistance in light of
humanitarian imperatives exemplified by the late
US president Ronald Reagan's dictum that a hungry
child knows no politics.
This leaves
internal linkages, such as improved
development-project monitoring and fiscal
transparency or training sessions for government
officials and project managers. But has Chinese
and South Korean bilateral aid weakened the case
for such internal linkages? The amount of
multilateral aid flowing to North Korea has
declined significantly, from 900,000 tonnes in
2001 to 300,000 tonnes in 2005. [122] Bilateral
assistance has grown as a proportion of overall
aid during this period, but, tellingly, South
Korean assistance has not increased in monetary
value. "So how could South Korea's stable
bilateral and multilateral aid to North Korea
since 2000-01 undermine the WFP's negotiating
leverage in 2005?" asks Brooking Institution
scholar Wonhyuk Lim. [123] Meanwhile, Seoul has,
like the United Nations' World Food Program and
NGOs before it, made an effort to ensure
transparency and to engage in respectful
negotiations with Pyongyang. As Dongguk University
Professor Park Sun-song observes, South Korea has
more influence on the Northern leadership, so the
additional goodwill it accrues by providing
bilateral assistance can theoretically be put to
more efficient use. [124]
So should we
conclude that linking food aid and human rights
through some form of conditionality is
counterproductive, even if food availability is to
some degree reflective of the overall level of
individual and collective freedoms in North Korean
society? Social Science Research Council program
director Alex de Waal entreats us to reconsider:
"When famine prevention is recognized as a human
right, and fought for using the sorts of political
structures that exist when human rights are
respected, then famine can be conquered. This is
not to abandon humanitarianism, which can again be
a force for ethical progress. But a
humanitarianism that sets itself against or above
politics is futile. Rather we should seek a form
of politics that transforms humanitarianism."
[125] De Waal's answer is not substantively
different from the recommendation in the UN Human
Development Report 2000: that the people enmeshed
in a food crisis must mobilize and establish their
own priorities in the policy sphere. This is an
important point and must serve as an organizing
principle in both humanitarian and human rights
work, for it is an unfortunate failing of both
approaches to treat target populations as victims
and not actors in their own right. Both de Waal
and the UN report agree that humanitarianism and a
rights-based approach should not be set against
one another.
At an official level, North
Korea has numerous laws that respect the human
rights of its citizens. However, at an operational
level, it maintained laws, even during a food
crisis, that substantially violated the rights of
its citizens, whether related to freedom of
movement or the freedom to engage in economic
activities. At a functional level, though,
citizens were able to overwhelm these laws by
traveling in large numbers without passes and
engaging in gray market activities. North Koreans,
although they did not create independent political
parties or independent media, carved out new and
expanded civil realities under extremely adverse
conditions. This third level, wherein North
Koreans proved they could act as subjects and not
simply objects, is frequently ignored in analyses
of "real, existing" human rights in North Korea.
Sovereignty Humanitarian
workers are agents of change both internally and
externally. They serve as informants about what is
going on within North Korea as they debrief in
both formal and informal settings when they return
to their countries, potentially contributing to
external policy change. When they introduce
innovative ideas into North Korea, exposing
officials and scientists and farm managers to new
techniques and ways of organizing their tasks, aid
workers contribute to changing the very
environment in which they work.
To what
degree these humanitarians cross the line and
become instruments of their home country's
government is difficult to determine. But, as Dr
Ruediger Frank argues, North Korea has certainly
perceived many of these aid workers as suspect.
[126] In other words, allowing humanitarian
workers into the country doesn't only challenge
the country's philosophy of juche or
self-reliance; more important, it undermines
Pyongyang's sovereign power to introduce change at
its own pace, since government loses its monopoly
over the control of information.
North
Korea's perceptions concerning the politicization
of humanitarianism have not been mere paranoia. US
food aid, for instance, has always been integrated
into political-change strategies that challenge
the sovereign decision-making of other countries.
Washington extended its first food aid to
Venezuela after a natural disaster in 1823 to
boost support for a US-friendly political party.
Food aid to Europe after World War II - which
spread to the Third World during the subsequent
development era - was part of a larger strategy of
consolidating an anti-communist front. The late US
vice president Hubert Humphrey declared in an
unguarded moment: "We have to look upon America's
food abundance not as a liability, but as a real
asset ... Wise statesmanship and leadership can
convert these surpluses into a great asset for
checking communist aggression." [127] The Food for
Peace program, meanwhile, was designed quite
explicitly to create demand for US agricultural
surpluses, stimulating a taste for dairy products
or wheat or corn in countries that had never
included such items in their diet.
Any
notion that the short-term political
considerations that once governed US food aid
policy no longer apply today is a myth, according
to scrutiny of Washington's food aid policies
toward Afghanistan, Iraq, and North Korea by
analysts Christopher Barrett and Daniel Maxwell.
[128] US government officials claim that aid to
North Korea is purely humanitarian. But even as
fierce a critic of North Korea as Action Contre la
Faim has acknowledged that "US support seeks to
make the North Korean regime heavily dependent on
US aid while allowing the United States to
increase its leverage with North Korea". [129]
North Korea wants to eradicate precisely
this type of leverage. The pursuit of its
juche goal influences Pyongyang's approach
to energy sources (nuclear power reduces reliance
on Chinese capacity and potential South Korean
electricity). It also influences its approach to
food aid. To rely on one single source - China,
the World Food Program, the US Congress or South
Korea - gives that sole source unacceptable
leverage. For North Korea to be dependent on other
countries for largesse - instead of what it views
as a short-term infusion of capital to jump-start
the rebuilding of its economy - is anathema.
North Korea's move away from dependency on
humanitarian aid is also pragmatic, given donor
fatigue and pressing food crises elsewhere in the
world. North Korea's pragmatism and
national-security concerns, however, are
compromised by its weakness. This weakness has
forced the country to fall back on a rather
old-fashioned conception of state sovereignty,
which it has asserted against both popular
sovereignty and the forces of economic
globalization and human-rights interventionism. On
food matters, Pyongyang is forced into a position
of choosing who will call the shots (the WFP,
South Korea or China) rather than calling the
shots itself. The few levers at its disposal - the
resurrection of the Public Distribution System,
the continuation of market reforms, or the
rejection of external linkages - are relatively
weak. To import food and go into further external
debt only increases the weakness of the
government.
This paucity of choices
amounts to a sovereignty of the weak. Some
countries are powerful enough systematically to
disregard the decisions, democratic or autocratic,
of other nation-states (eg, US policy toward Chile
in 1973 and toward Serbia in the late 1990s). In
this hegemonic "sovereignty of the strong",
powerful states assert the primacy of their
sovereign powers not only within their own
territories but even overseas (eg, the US
opposition to the application of International
Criminal Court jurisdiction over US troops in
other countries). Meanwhile, mid-level powers
often attempt to solicit the support of both the
dominant and the weak to construct a sovereignty
of international law to level the playing field
with consistent rules and regulations. North Korea
remains suspicious of the latter, perceiving, for
instance, a hidden regime-change agenda lurking
within international laws concerning human-rights
standards. The dissembling behavior of overbearing
nations and the weak and inconsistent application
of standards by institutions of international law
- which contribute to Stephen Krasner's notion of
sovereignty as "organized hypocrisy" [130] - help
us understand North Korea's decision to cling to
the outdated Westphalian model.
The South
Korean approach to engagement acknowledges the
importance that North Korea accords to issues of
sovereignty. Seoul's decision formally to eschew
the absorption path under Kim Dae-jung has
necessarily led to a slow-motion reunification
imagined to stretch over several decades. In this
context, bilateral South Korean food aid is
designed to help support the "progress of
North-South relations". [131] Given that
anti-communism or boosting exports previously
served as legitimate reasons for promoting food
aid, South Koreans wonder why the promotion of
unification can't be an equally legitimate
consideration. Seoul perceives concrete benefits
from offering food aid, both short-term (progress
in ongoing economic and political negotiations)
and long-term (investing a smaller amount now to
avoid much larger infusions to resuscitate a
failed state later on). The issue is not whether
food aid comes attached with strings, but rather
which country gets to attach the strings and enjoy
the political advantages that ensue. In other
words, "who gets the take that accompanies the
give" is the subject of important but largely
unstated power struggles.
South Korea
faces a paradox. As a long-term goal, its
conception of North-South engagement would
substantially reduce North Korean state
sovereignty through a confederal or federal
arrangement. In the interim, however, Seoul's
approach is reinforcing that same state
sovereignty by strengthening the North Korean
system. Pyongyang can enter the reunification
process on a more or less equal footing only when
the North-South gap in capabilities is narrowed.
Yet from Seoul's perspective, the narrowing of the
gap requires strengthening North Korea's central
government, not simply maintaining it (and
certainly not toppling it). Such strengthening
translates, again in the short term, into a
reassertion of Pyongyang's sovereign control over
its food system, from production to distribution,
from import levels to technical reforms. South
Korea's strategy vis-a-vis popular sovereignty, a
necessarily sensitive issue, is not altogether
clear. Greater people-to-people contact might well
encourage the seeds of civil society in the North.
But Seoul continues to recognize and interact with
Pyongyang as the primary interlocutor and locus of
power.
South Korea's approach to North
Korean sovereignty also runs counter to a brand of
humanitarianism currently in vogue. When
neutrality was a universally recognized value for
international NGOs, the Red Cross won the Nobel
Peace Prize (in 1944 and 1963). But as Michael
Schloms points out, Medecins Sans Frontieres won
the award in 1999 for quite the opposite reason.
"The main characteristic of this new generation of
humanitarianism," Schloms writes, "is the
disrespect of sovereignty." [132]
This
divergence within the humanitarian movement
mirrors the two main geopolitical approaches to
resolving the nuclear crisis on the Korean
Peninsula: negotiating with Pyongyang
(acknowledging its sovereignty) versus seeking
regime change (undermining the state's sovereignty
in favor of an imagined popular sovereignty).
South Korea's policy on supplying food (or
food-related development assistance) necessarily
navigates between the shoals of humanitarianism
and geopolitics, between supportive and dismissive
positions on state sovereignty.
Conclusion We are left with two
difficult questions. Does the human-rights
framework help us understand the origins of and
domestic responses to North Korea's famine? And
how can the international community best assist
North Koreans to improve their overall access to
food?
Regarding the first question, the
human-rights framework did little to help us
understand the sources of the famine, for it
introduced the notion of deliberate malice in what
can be understood as a combination of policy
errors and natural disasters. Few would argue that
the US government's response to the Hurricane
Katrina disaster was a human-rights violation
rather than a set of bad policies. The structural
racism of US society that ensured that the
hurricane would have disproportionate effects on
whites and blacks in New Orleans, Louisiana, can
be compared to the structural inequalities in
North Korean society (based on inherited privilege
or on differential access to the emerging market).
Government policies should be designed to mitigate
those structural inequalities. Government policies
that don't are bad policies but not human-rights
violations. So, too, does the human-rights
framework prove inadequate when understanding the
relationship between market reforms and the right
to food, at least as it relates specifically to
the North Korean context (unless one advocates the
broader argument that free markets systematically
deprive people worldwide of human rights).
In explaining Pyongyang's response to the
famine, the human-rights framework proves useful
in some respects and not in others. While
diversion and triage have proved to be largely
non-issues - at least in terms of human-rights
violations - the human-rights framework is useful
for understanding the relationship between, for
instance, the right of movement and the worsening
of famine conditions. Such a framework is also
helpful in highlighting the empowerment of the
North Korean people as the rightful center of
humanitarian policy. As such, food aid is not an
apolitical enterprise. It can and should
strengthen more than simply the right to food. But
should it strengthen the larger bundle of human
rights explicitly or implicitly?
This
leads us to the second question. External
linkages, which challenge North Korea's sovereign
right to design and implement policy within its
borders, are not likely to improve its citizens'
access to food substantially. The North Korean
leadership will resist externally induced change,
less food will enter the country as a result, and
the policy of external linkage will backfire.
It might be argued that the tide of
history has turned against Pyongyang's
interpretation of sovereignty, so countries
frustrated with this outmoded approach should
intensify their pressure until North Korea
ultimately buckles. By this logic, instead of
providing a Band-Aid of food relief, the
international community should pressure Pyongyang
to change its system to conform to the
recommendations of economists and the political
observations of Amartya Sen. However, external
pressures have not led to a change in North
Korea's regime, despite many expectations to the
contrary. Indeed, as the case of Cuba suggests,
external policies that too explicitly challenge
state sovereignty help to reinforce government
stability by allowing the leadership to employ
nationalism to rally popular support (or at least
to deflect public dissatisfaction). Even if
external linkages were to lead to regime collapse,
a great many people might slip backward into
famine for an unknown period of time. In other
words, even if external linkage successfully
attains its interim objective (regime change), it
may fail miserably at meeting its overall goal
(feeding the hungry).
Internal linkages
that acknowledge North Korean sovereignty, whether
proposed by international actors or countries in
the region, stand a better chance of not only
increasing access to food but also incrementally
expanding the social space that North Koreans have
courageously carved out for themselves. Such
internal linkages - better monitoring and
targeting, training sessions for North Korean
officials - have a track record of improving
access to food in the country; the impact of
external linkages remains hypothetical. Such
internal linkages, to be successful, ideally occur
in an atmosphere of political rapprochement. Only
then will the larger human-rights framework -
political/civil as well as economic/social rights
- be on the negotiating agenda with Pyongyang.
Paradoxically perhaps, recognizing state
sovereignty may also create more opportunities for
popular sovereignty to take root. When the North
Korean state can incrementally relax its grip on
the population - because engagement policies have
allayed the leadership's anxieties over the
country's weakened sovereignty - social and
economic liberalization can proceed. It is at this
intriguing juncture that engagement policies and
human-rights advocacy intersect in many
interesting and still-uncharted ways.
Notes [117] Fiona Terry,
"Feeding the dictator". [118] Stephan Haggard
and Marcus Noland, Hunger and Human Rights. [119] Ibid, p 35. [120] Ibid, p 38.
[121] Claudia Rosett, "Food for Nukes?",
OpinionJournal. [122] Mark Manyin, "US
Assistance to North Korea: Factsheet",
Congressional Research Service, January 31, 2006.
[123] Wonhyuk Lim, "When in doubt, blame South
Korea", NAPSNET (Northeast Asia Peace and Security
Network) Policy Forum Online 06-13A, February 16,
2006. [124] Interview with Park Sun-song,
December 8, 2005. [125] Alex de Waal,
Famine Crimes (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1997), p 6. [126] Ruediger
Frank, "Food aid to North Korea or how to ride a
Trojan horse to death", NAPSNET, September 13,
2005. [127] Vernon Ruttan, "The Politics of US
Food Aid Policy", in Vernon Ruttan, ed, Why
Food Aid? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993), p 2. [128] Christopher Barrett
and Daniel Maxwell, Food Aid after Fifty
Years (London: Routledge, 2005), p 150.
[129] Christophe Reltien, "Humanitarian Action
in North Korea: Ostrich Politics", in The
Geopolitics of Hunger, 2000-2001: Hunger and
Power (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner,
2001), p. 166. [130] Stephen Krasner,
Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1999). [131] South Korean Ministry of
Unification, "ROK Refutes Report". [132]
Michael Schloms, North Korea and the Timeless
Dilemma of Aid (Munster: Lit Verlag, 1994), p
69.
John Feffer is the
co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.
This is the final article in a four-part
report. This series of articles was produced under
the auspices of a research project sponsored by
the Sejong Institute. It will be published in book
form this year.
