Mick Hartley

We keep reading articles about the imminent collapse of the Kim dynasty in North Korea, and here's another one. It has to happen some time:

International food donations are vital to the KFR's ability to maintain some semblance of stability, and without them the country would have collapsed long ago, which is why this multi-million dollar international panhandling by Kim has become an institutionalised part of the regime's scheme for staying in power year after year. Since the peak of North Korea's food crisis–causing up to 2 million deaths by famine–in the mid-1990s, donations from South Korea, the United States and the UN World Food Programme have been a regular staple of North Korean diet.

Up until recently Kim has been able to keep receiving food donations, deliveries of agricultural fertilizers, and other international aid using a combination of scare tactics. Threats of missile tests or the more recent fears that North Korea would take some rash action with its nuclear weapons program have been the chief cards that Kim's regime has to play.

Begging for food handouts with one hand while spending untold millions on nuclear enrichment and ballistic missile development programs in the other is more than contradictory. But these twin evils of a ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs in the hand of an erratic dictator are a lesser concern to North Korea's neighbors than the nightmare that would unfold if the regime imploded. Both China and South Korea would suddenly became responsible for the care and feeding of millions of famished refugees streaming across their borders.

This scenario, more than any other, is what scares everyone–and what has kept food donations coming into North Korea until now. More than one analyst in Beijing that is aware of all of the possible implications of a North Korean economic and social meltdown has told me on numerous occasions that "it is to everyone's advantage for North Korea to stay exactly the way it is," and that "no nation has more potentially to lose from such an eventuality than [South Korea]." Therefore, it is better to buy off the KFR with these donations than risk the alternatives.

Parallels of the economic burden to South Korea having to unite with its northern neighbor, and the 1989 integration of the Federal Republic of Germany with the former East German Democratic Republic (GDR) are vastly understated. South Korea would have to try and absorb a number of people that is a far larger percentage of a total North-South population than East Germany's five states are to the total of the now united Germany.

Furthermore, income, living standards, and infrastructure disparities between Kim's worker's paradise and South Korea are far more pronounced then they were between West Germany and the GDR. Economic analysis of the two Koreas estimates that if South Korea could survive the costs of unifying with its northern half–and this is a fairly large "if"–it would still be a decade or more before incomes in the north even reached 55 per cent of those in the south.

But it is the reliance on this international food aid for Kim's political survival–and the dismal ability of the North Korean regime to feed its population–that may ultimately spell the end of his regime. The recent decisions by South Korea to suspend food shipments until the north will permit monitoring of how this aid is distributed (a position also taken by the UN World Food Programme) may also hasten this downfall. Pyongyang took yet another step in this direction this week by simply rejecting the latest tranche of food aid shipments from the U.S. without providing any explanation.

The central reason for the UN and South Korean insistence upon more on-site monitoring is that stealing and then selling this food aid has become big business in North Korea. Up to 30 percent of the food aid intended for the starving and needy in North Korea ends up being diverted by the military and other individuals with influence into a growing network of private markets. There this food aid is either sold outright or bartered for consumer goods.

These private markets–an ideological anathema in Kim's orthodox Stalinist state–are now the prime source of income for up to 80 per cent of the households in North Korea. This has two significant consequences for the KFR. One is that Kim may no longer use food to exercise the absolute power of life and death over the population as he has in the past. Access to adequate food was always something that the Great Leader could grant or take away, but he no longer has full control over these food shipments and these private markets are now a shadow economy that can provide a way out of starvation for those with money or influence.

The other dilemma is that to now to cut-off food donations entirely would cause the collapse of most of economic activity in the country. It is unlikely that those who are working in these private markets would sit still while their new-found source of income was taken away from them. Thus, this week's decision by North Korea to reject the latest shipments of U.S. food aid raises real questions about how soon this drop in food aid available for diversion will reverberate inside this semi-legal market economy in North Korea and what the reactions may be. […]

There are also reports from more than a year ago about the number of people now escaping from North Korea. Only 41 North Koreans were able to escape to the south in 1995, but by 2007 the number of those crossing over per year had grown to 2,000, largely because the police, border guards and other officials are all now taking bribes to permit these people to leave.

Three elements are very clear, according to several China-based analysts who spoke to me. One is that there is too much money to be made by this private trading–whether it is trading in food aid and consumer goods or trading in people who want to cross the border. Two is that those officials in the military and secret police allowing people to cross the border or for these private markets to stay open are no longer afraid of retaliation for accepting the bribes they are paid to look the other way. Three, and most serious of all, is why they take what risk there is in accepting these bribes, which stems from their view of the regime's current viability.

"The situation in North Korea looks increasingly like one in which the organs of state security and the military have decided that they should try and make as much money for themselves right now – while they still have time," said one analyst familiar with the history of North Korean illegal trade and immigration in and out of China. "It means that those on the inside and in the best position to know have decided they think the Kim regime's days are numbered."

No updates, as far as I'm aware on the two reporters held (kidnapped?) by the North Koreans. They are facing "intense interrogation" in Pyongyang.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders called for the journalists' immediate release, and urged China and North Korea to clarify where the women were detained. Their capture in China would violate international law, the group's Asia-Pacific Desk chief said.

"It's a kidnapping; it's not an arrest," Vincent Brossel told reporters in Seoul. "It's a new case of kidnapping by the North Korean regime against civilians, in this case journalists."

More cards, along with the much-publicised missile launch, for Kim to play.