Mick Hartley

With the prospect looming of another famine, there’s an urgent need to get humanitarian aid to North Korea, but the regime has demanded unmonitorable “development aid” instead. Now, in the wake of the six-party talks debacle, comes this, from Jonathan Watts in the Observer:

North Korea has begun to reverse market reforms by kicking out international relief workers and choking off supplies of food and medical aid in a crackdown that puts millions of the country’s children and elderly at risk.

In what one resident described as the biggest change in the humanitarian situation in 10 years, the government in Pyongyang is attempting to regain control over the distribution of essential supplies that have increasingly been provided by the market and outside donors.

As of yesterday, stall-holders have been ordered to stop trading in cereals, including rice. From now on they can only be sold at controlled prices through the state’s public distribution system.

This is not the only regressive step. In August the government told foreign non-governmental organisations that they must leave by the end of the year. Groups such as the World Food Programme and the Red Cross and Red Crescent – which have fed more than a fifth of the country’s 23 million population and provided two-thirds of essential drugs since the famines of the mid-Nineties – will have to stop providing food and medicine on 1 January.

The controls appear to be an effort to close the gates of economic reform that were opened in 2002 through government relaxation of price controls. […]

Most of the foreign NGO workers have been told they must pack their bags. At first they were told operations could only continue if they switched to development, rather than humanitarian, work and used only North Korean staff. More recently, they were told they could keep one foreigner in Pyongyang. Glyn Ford, an MEP and an expert on North Korea, said such conditions would be unacceptable to the EU, which has provided substantial amounts of aid in the past five years. ‘We insist on monitoring. One member of staff won’t be enough for that,’ he said.

With negotiations continuing, the full impact of the changes is still unclear. The WFP was feeding 6.5 million people at the start of this year. But most NGOs and diplomats say the biggest worry is not food but medicine.

This claim (that medicine, not food, is the biggest worry) is hard to square with some of the other information that’s coming out. Whatever, it spells further disaster for the people of North Korea and has to put a large question mark over any attempts to deal rationally with Kim’s regime.

In the circumstances, it’s worth quoting from the conclusion to Jasper Becker’s “Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea“, where he looks at the dismal failure of the various policies of appeasement, from the Clinton-Carter accords of 1994 to the Sunshine policies of South Korea’s Kim Dae Jung (for which he was awarded the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize).

Foremost, North Korea poses a moral question. Between them, Kim Il Sung and his son are responsible for the deaths of over seven million Koreans – three million civilians in the Korean War, and, by some estimates, three million in the famine and at least a million deaths of political prisoners during the last 50 years. After a succession of statesmen – Jiang Zemin, Vladimir Putin, Kim Dae Jung, Sweden’s Goran Petersen, Madeleine Albright – have returned home to tell us how rational, well informed, witty, charming, and deeply popular Kim Jong Il is, President Bush’s judgement that Kim is loathsome seems the only honest and truthful one.