LITTLE ROCK — THESE days, whenever we see that North Korea has made the news again, we can’t help but think about the boy who wished for war.
The story was in the New York Times last year. A North Korean woman who had escaped to the relative freedom of Red China (imagine!) spoke to a reporter about her son who was left behind. The boy wished for war, she said. If for nothing else, to ease his pain. Or as mother put it: “My son says he wishes the war would come because life is too hard, and we will probably die anyway from starvation.”
Starvation, if you will, is a way of life in North Korea. At least for the regular folks. You’ll note that the Kims don’t look starved in the pictures that the state media releases on occasion. Kim Jong Il, and his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, look like they’re fed enough. More than enough, actually. Dispatches from that part of the world tell stories about how the ruling class is fed the best the world has to offer, from lobster to expensive booze. Those who must work and die in that prison of a country don’t have it as well. Word is that the Army has trouble recruiting enoughsoldiers-because malnutrition is so rampant that many of the young people in North Korea don’t have the mental capacity to adapt to military life. Imagine being so malnourished that you can’t learn to move, shoot and communicate. On second thought, don’t imagine that. Too depressing.
This week the Washington Post reports on another depressing development. Things have gotten so bad in North Korea that the Kim regime has allowed its diplomats to beg the rest of the world for food.
Usually, the thugs in Pyongyang just demand it. Send food now-or else we’ll fry the innards of another mountain or shoot another firecracker over the Pacific. Then, when the world complies, as it has often done before, the regime acts as though it has shown the most restraint. And tells its citizens that all those bags of rice with the little U.S. flags all over them are tributes from a United States shaking in its boots. Nice.
YOU’D THINK you’d have to work at it to be this unlucky: North Korea has once again been plagued by floods. This winter has also been more brutal than usual, in a land that’s known for brutal winters. (Some folks reading this column today might have been one of the Frozen Chosin. Bless you for your service.) Now the Post reports there’s been an outbreak of a livestock disease. What’s next? Locusts?
The UN’s food program is running out of care packages. So Pyongyang has ordered its embassies around theworld to ask for help.
That help might not be coming. At least from countries that can mostly easily provide it.
Two years ago, the United States suspended food aid to North Korea because nobody could tell if the food was going to the hungry, or to those atop of the regime. (You’d be forgiven, Observant Reader, if you had an opinion on that matter.) A state department official says the U.S. has no plans to start up rice shipment again-not at this point anyway.
It’s a tough decision. But probably the right one. At least until we know who’s getting the food.
With people taking to the streets from Libya to Iran and countries inbetween, now might be the best time to ratchet up the pressure on the Kim regime. In the past, when people in North Korea died of starvation, they died quietly. Well, at least they died unheard.Or to quote Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, in his 2008 Foreign Affairs commentary about the mass starvation in 1996-1999: “Trained under the old system, deprived of opportunities to organize, and ignorant about the outside world, North Korea’s starving farmers did not rebel. They just died.”
They just died.
They don’t just die anymore. Not according to reports from the marketplaces outside the well-bugged capital city of Pyongyang. People interviewed in last year’s Times piece said folks are talking out loud about the regime’s failures. North Koreans now dare to criticize the Kims-even if it puts their lives in danger, and it does. It’s amazing how brave a human can become when he watches his children cry from hunger. It may seem brutal to withhold rice and other foods now, when North Koreans need it most, but what if this regime is on the brink of collapse? Why protect it even one more day?
Besides, if the West did send tons of food, who’s to say the food would reach the starving? If North Korea won’t allow outsiders to track the food from the 38th Parallel to the homes of the needy, then it’s North Korea’s government that’s starving its people. Which is yet more cause to wish its demise as soon as possible.
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That said, if North Korea were to allow outsiders to track the food to its people, we’d probably re-think the whole thing. Starving children, starving mothers, starving elderly . . . . Some reports say that one in three children is stunted and one in four pregnant women is malnourished. Many of us in the West wish the worst on the regime in Pyongyang, but we still have our souls to think about.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 02/26/2011