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North Korea: Forlorn
nation
By Ahn Mi-Young
SEOUL
- As Pyongyang's desperate game of brinkmanship
continues, activists say food aid to North Korea should
not be halted and, indeed, needs to be increased.
United Nations special envoy Maurice Strong said
that in a country of 22 million, eight million people -
half of them children - are in a "life or death"
situation.
"The first victims of North Korea's
nuclear action are its starving children who have
nothing to do with politics," said Chung Jung-Ae, a
member of the Korean Welfare Foundation (KWF). "What
these children badly need is just one cup of milk,
potato soup and bread just to survive."
Local
activists estimate that foreign aid to North Korea has
fallen from US$360 million in 1999 to half that in 2000,
and is expected to have declined further in 2002.
Already, US food aid to North Korea fell from 300,000
tons in 2001 to 155,000 tons in 2002. Japan has
virtually suspended food delivery to North Korea since
the start of 2002.
UN officials say North
Korea's real humanitarian needs cannot be ignored while
South Korea, China and now Russia try to break the
standoff between Washington and Pyongyang in the wake of
the North's admission last October of its secret
uranium-enrichment program.
North Korea's
nuclear measures and the fallout from it are likely to
dampen interest in giving humanitarian assistance,
activists fear.
"You cannot make the children,
the ill people, the old people victims of a political
crisis with which they have had nothing to do," Strong
said on Saturday after a three-day visit to North Korea.
"If we sit back, North Korea would almost have
one generation of children disappear from its population
in the worst case," John Powell of the World Food
Program (WFP) was quoted as saying by the
Korean-language newspaper Joongang. UN officials were
already worried by declining food aid in recent years.
In 2002, the WFP fed 3.4 million people, down from 6.4
million in 2001, most of them children.
Local
media reports quote WFP officials as saying that the UN
agency secured only 35,000 tons of food for North Korea
as of early January 2003 - one third of what it needs to
implement for the country in the first quarter of 2003.
Since the WFP has cut back its programs, one
million North Korean children at primary schools have
not received food rations since September. Another
460,000 in kindergartens have not had food rations since
October, and 920,000 children in nursery homes likewise
since November.
Meanwhile, humanitarian and
religious groups are urging South Koreans to donate what
they can to the North. South Korean non-governmental
organizations raised $65 million for North Korea in
2002, up from $35 million in 2000.
"If you
donate 5,000 won [US$4], you could feed one North Korean
child for a month," explained a KWF campaigner. The KWF
is also collecting clothes, medicine and powdered milk
too.
To many South Korean activists, schemes
like this stress the need to keep North Korea's
humanitarian needs separate from political issues such
as concerns over the North's nuclear program - and calls
by some for economic sanctions on the already struggling
country.
Another KWF program donates ingredients
to make milk-rich bread for North Korean children. This
bread campaign - under way since 2001 - reaches some
15,000 children in about 17 kindergartens and 18
nurseries in Pyongyang.
"One bread for each kid
at the lunch table is good enough to be a party there,"
said KWF director Kim Hyung-Seok.
Children from
the two Koreas have different human development
indicators. Chronic lack of nutrition means that a
seven-year-old North Korean child has an average height
of 105 centimeters, compared to the South Korean average
of 125cm.
Some here say that South Korea should
look after its own poor first. But Chung argued: "It's a
matter of poverty when a South Korean child is starving.
But it is a matter of survival when a North Korean child
is starving. Unless fed today, that child would be
seriously malnourished or even die."
(Inter
Press Service)
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