Human rights committee urges Seoul to change method of NK aid
09/01/2005
Lee Dong,
Yonhap (South Korea)
in-- South Korea must change the way it gives aid to North Korea to maximize effectiveness of international relief efforts, a human rights group said Thursday.
Claiming that the communist state's chronic food shortage has as much to do with its faulty political system as with natural disasters, the group asserted in a report that up to 30 percent of food aid is being diverted.
"One has to engage, one has to accept the imperative to relieve the suffering," Marcus Noland, a co-author of the report, said at a news conference.
"On the other hand, we need to be clear about the terms of that engagement," he said.
"That's why we place so much emphasis on getting South Korea into the WFP (World Food Program). Then you would have South Korea strengthening the attempt by the WFP to bring more transparency and nondiscrimination in relief efforts."
The report, titled "Hunger and Human Rights: The Politics of Famine in North Korea," was commissioned by the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
The committee, created in 2001, is a nongovernmental organization based in Washington.
Noland, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, wrote the report with Prof. Stephan Haggard of the University of California, San Diego.
"The problem is much more systemic... the problem is the North Korean regime itself," said Haggard about the root of the famine, which he estimated caused as many as 1 million deaths from starvation over the past decade.
And yet, between 25 and 30 percent of the food aid going into the country is being diverted, flowing into a market where the needy are forced to buy or barter for provisions, he said.
North Korea, which champions a "juche" (self-reliance) ideology created by its late founder, Kim Il-sung, has been relying mostly on handouts from the international community for the past decade.
South Korea, which shares a heavily fortified border with North Korea since the national division over a half a century ago, is a major aid provider, along with China, the North's ideological ally.
Donations from other nations have largely been funneled through the WFP, which distributes food directly in North Korea.
But the organization's efforts have been frustrated by Pyongyang's refusal to allow full outside monitoring of its distribution and rationing system.
Officials in Pyongyang blame the disastrous famine on years of repeated flood and drought, but the report refutes that claim in part.
"North Korea's tragedy has many roots, but a famine of this magnitude could only have occurred in a system in which the political leadership was insulated from events on the ground and lacking in accountability to its people," the report said.
"Rather than using humanitarian assistance as an addition to domestic production and commercial sources of supply, the (North Korean) government has used aid largely as balance-of-payments support, allowing it to allocate the savings in commercial imports to other priorities, including military ones and luxury imports for the elite," said the report.
The report criticizes South Korea and China for giving aid outside of the WFP, which puts millions of tons of food outside monitoring and assessment targets.
"In this regard the practices of the South Korean government have been most disappointing," the report said.
"Special circumstances bind the South and North Korean people together. However, if China and South Korea assume the role of suppliers of last resort, North Korea will be able to avoid greater accountability," it said.
