Reconciling the Human Factor, by Erich Weingartner

[This article, first published on our partner-website 38North on Tuesday, 28 May 2013, is based on presentations given at Glendon College, York University in Toronto in April, and at UCLA, Los Angeles in May. It represents CanKor's attempt to provide a framework for rational discussion among conflicting policy alternatives aimed at relieving the suffering of North Korean people. CanKor Editor Erich Weingartner has been involved with Korea since 1978, spending half his career working on human rights and the other half dealing with humanitarian assistance. --CanKor]

Understanding the North Korean Human Rights/Humanitarian Divide

Author Erich Weingartner at UCLA conference on Ending the Korean War (Photo by Kil Sang Yoon)

With political leaders and the media perpetually focused on the behavior of a young hereditary leader and his nuclear-armed military, does anybody really care what happens to ordinary people in North Korea? There are two major constituencies internationally that do care: the humanitarian community and the human rights community.

When widespread starvation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) became evident in the mid to late 1990s, humanitarian agencies launched a massive and largely successful rescue effort to stem the famine. Human rights organizations have meanwhile played a pivotal role in exposing North Korea’s dismal record of abuses, culminating in the recent appointment by the United Nations Human Rights Council of a Commission of Inquiry (CoI).

Since both claim that their objective is to ease the plight of suffering North Koreans, you might think these communities would be natural allies. But sadly, those working on North Korean human rights do not seem to get along very well with those providing humanitarian assistance to the DPRK. Not only do their goals and methods often contradict each other, their practitioners sometimes engage in verbal battles and mutual recrimination. This conflict is likely to intensify now that the three-member CoI has begun its one-year assignment.

Has starvation become a foreign diplomacy tool?

[The Oregonian journalist Richard Read speaks to relief managers from Mercy Corps and Samaritan's Purse, who claim that the Obama administration has abandoned Ronald Reagan's “hungry-child policy” that separated food aid from politics. Read's article, reproduced below, first appeared in OregonLive.com on 13 April 2013. --CanKor]

Relief managers from Portland-based Mercy Corps say U.S. let North Koreans starve as retribution for missile launch

By Richard Read, The Oregonian, updated April 13, 2013 at 10:55 PM

A North Korean mother lies with her acutely malnourished son, plagued by sores, at a county hospital in September 2011. (Photo by Jim White, Mercy Corps)

A 3-year-old girl weighed less than 16 pounds, surviving on saline solution and ground rice. Babies lay passively, too weak to cry. Relief workers saw stunted and wasted children languishing in unheated hospitals amid floods and reduced rations during an unusually harsh winter.

That was two years ago. Portland-based Mercy Corps and four other humanitarian organizations given rare access to North Korea warned: “a catastrophic situation is developing.” After a year of prodding, the U.S. Agency for International Development announced 120,000 metric tons of food for North Korea.

But food never reached hungry Koreans. The Obama administration let political distrust, instead of need, dictate food policy.

Communication and good will broke down, leaving White House officials little to draw on today as Pyongyang ratchets up threats of nuclear attack.

Will Seoul engage North Korea soon? by Chung Min-uck

[Korea Times correspondent Chung Min-uck interviews CanKor Brain Trust member Victor Hsu, Director of International Aid and Education at the South Korean state-run Korea Development Institute (KDI), and Bernhard Seliger, a Seoul resident representative of the Hanns Seidel Foundation, a German organization active in Korea. The two experts applaud the new South Korean President's “trustpolitik”, and point out that the Park Geun-hye government still has opportunities to carry out a fundamental shift from the current ever-escalating inter-Korean tension. --CanKor]

Trucks loaded with flour as relief aid to North Korea pass a checkpoint on a bridge over the Imjin River in the South Korean border city of Paju, Gyeonggi Province, in this Sept. 21, 2012, file photo. The Seoul government sent 500 tons of flour to the impoverished North in one of the lastest aid supplies under the previous Lee Myung-bak administration. (Photo by Korea Times)

The government last week approved a shipment of humanitarian aid to North Korea, the first aid package approved under President Park Geun-hye, who took office on Feb. 25.

Under the approval, the Eugene Bell Foundation, a South Korean charity group, will ship tuberculosis medicine worth 678 million won (US $605,454) to eight tuberculosis clinics run by the South Korean group in North Korea as early as next month.

The latest gesture comes at a time when inter-Korean relations have hit rock bottom with the North threatening to use its nuclear weapons against South Korea and the United States, and in response, the two allies’ militaries signing a combined operational plan to raise deterrence against possible military threats by the North.

Although the unification ministry denied any political implications to the latest aid approval, referring to the move as being for “strictly humanitarian purposes,” foreign experts say such a symbolic gesture will help improve ties with the North.

“The amount is so little given the nature of the disease. It is a drop in the bucket,” said Victor Hsu, director of International Aid and Education at the state-run Korea Development Institute (KDI). “But the symbolic meaning I think is important. The symbolism of allowing the Eugene Bell Foundation to implement (aid shipments) is constructive in re-building inter-Korean relations.”

Victor Hsu: “Separate humanitarian issue from politics”

[CanKor Brain Trust member Prof Victor Hsu was interviewed by The Korea Times correspondent Chung Min-uck on 25 March 2013. --CanKor]

Victor Hsu of Korea Development Institute (Photo by The Korea Times)

Victor Hsu, 63, director of International Aid and Education at the state-run Korea Development Institute (KDI), believes humanitarian aid should be given to North Korea regardless of the political situation.

“Humanitarian aid should be separate from political considerations,” Hsu said in an interview with The Korea Times. “The humanitarian principle suggests that one must give assistance because there is need, and a human being is suffering or ill. So, the humanitarian imperative should be foremost.”

“Coming from the NGO community, I would like to emphasize that very strongly,” he added.

The KDI professor worked for World Vision International from 2005 to 2010, providing humanitarian aid to North Korea.

He was the national director for North Korea, overseeing various types of aid given to the isolated nation. Hsu was also with the U.S. National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches, and visited the North numerous times during his career, since the 1980s.

Update on First Steps activities, by Susan Ritchie

[First Steps is a Vancouver-based Christian development organization whose primary purpose is preventing child malnutrition in North Korea through programs that provide essential nutrients to young children. Its founding director Susan Ritchie recently returned from a visit to the DPRK and sent us this report. For more on First Steps and Ms Ritchie, see the Chosun Ilbo article “Canadian Who Became 'Mother' to N.Korean Orphans”. --CanKor]

First Steps founding director Susan Ritchie explains her charity’s activities in North Korea while showing a picture taken in a factory she visited there. (Photo by Chosun Ilbo)

First Steps currently has two programs. First Steps’ soymilk program is currently reaching more than 90,000 children with a daily cup of soymilk. The micro -nutrient Sprinkles program is reaching approx. 70,000 pregnant women and babies from 6 – 24 months. Sprinkles prevent anemia and reduce morbidity (for example, deaths from diarrhea and pneumonia as well as rickets, etc.). As in-kind donations are becoming more available we are increasingly able to engage in relief work when there is a need.

We are shipping 3 larger food processing units to Wonsan in the coming weeks and expect that the total number of FS soymilk beneficiaries will soon exceed 100,000 children. The FS soymilk plants are working exceptionally well in the cities, counties and farms where we work. The food processing equipment that we send is a good fit for NK. Last year we shipped 280 metric tonnes of soybeans to supplement the local supply. We currently have 75 tonnes of soys en route.

I mentioned Deokchon in our last newsletter. It’s a city of 250,000 people, almost all of whom are engaged in mining coal (400 metres underground) or relevant activities to feed the coal plant in Pyongyang. We first visited the area after they had suffered a landside that took 46 lives and left more than 8,000 people homeless last summer. We partnered with ShelterBox to send in tents and then we sent in a 20′ container of relief foods for the children. Last week we visited the city again to confirm the arrival of the food, etc.

I Thought Groundhog Day was Last Week

So North Korea continues its streak as the only country that has tested a nuclear weapon in the past fifteen years.

The official English statement that was released by KCNA is interesting for two reasons. The first is that Pyongyang elegantly stated that the weapon that it tested yesterday was a smaller version (“miniaturized” per the Korean language version) of the weapons that were tested in 2006 and 2009. This of course is a thinly veiled statement directed towards those worried about the DPRK building a bomb that could fit snugly on top of a Taepodong rocket. Pyongyang’s answer is “si, su puede.”

The other interesting part of the statement is North Korea’s claim that its nuclear deterrent has become “diversified.” The most orthodox interpretation of this is that North Korea now possesses a bomb different from those that it tested earlier: namely, one of the Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) variety. This would be alarming in many respects: it means that the DPRK has, despite the myriad of sanctions lodged against it, acquired this technology. It means that the DPRK, with this technology, can continue to produce HEU type weapons en masse: since if there’s anything that’s remotely abundant in North Korea, it’s uranium. It also means that there has been some sort of cooperation between the DPRK and someone, whether it be China, or Pakistan, or Iran.

Agricultural Reform Again—or Not? by Randall Ireson

[CanKor Brain Trust member Randall Ireson published the following article in our partner-site 38North. Mr. Ireson previously spent over a decade working for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), managing an agricultural project on several North Korean farms. His numerous on-site visits to the country's Co-operative  farms have made him one of the foremost experts on agriculture in the DPRK. --CanKor]

Beginning in early July, a variety of sources have reported possible changes in DPRK farm policy, especially with regard to the organization of work teams and the share of produce which farms can retain. Information is rather spotty and inconsistent so far, and even if the government has decided to implement policy changes on a large scale, it is uncertain if they would actually lead to improved food production. The central question is whether DPRK authorities are interested in creating conditions that genuinely support farm development, or whether they are just trying to manipulate a few select policy elements without addressing any of the fundamental institutional obstacles to economic growth.

DPRK farm scene (Photo by E.Weingartner)

One of the earliest reports [1] outlined the main elements of what is being referred to as the “6.28 Policy,” or more formally as the “June 28 New Economic Management Measures.” These measures are:

• Sub-work teams at the farms will be reduced to 4-6 persons;
• The state will collect 70 percent of the production quota and the farm will keep 30 percent;
• The farm can keep any production above the established quota;
• Produce retained by the farm can be sold in the market at free-market prices; and
• Private investment in production is allowed if under the auspices of state or cooperative enterprises.

Surprise! We Have Satellite(s)!

Some quick thoughts on the rocket launch:

CSIS annual report worries about DPRK security threat

[Although we have not seen any of this in the Canadian press, this article by Lee Chi-dong appeared in Yonhap News Agency on 24 September 2012, and was reprinted by The Korea Times. --CanKor]

Canada ratcheting up pressure on N. Korea

Canada expressed worries Sunday over security risks from North Korea’s nuclear proliferation, the latest in a series of moves to put diplomatic pressure on the communist nation.

“North Korea’s nuclear proliferation has a destabilizing impact on the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia. Canada has significant economic and strategic interests in this region that could be at risk from North Korea’s activities in this regard,” Canadian Security Intelligence Service said in an annual report on global security threats.

The agency noted North Korea, which conducted two nuclear tests in the past, operates a uranium enrichment program on top of “sufficient plutonium for a small arsenal of nuclear weapons.”

“North Korea has shown no inclination to ‘denuclearize,’ as called for by the international community and, moreover, has been proven willing to export its nuclear technology to states such as Syria,” it said.

Canada, a G-8 member, has not been directly involved in the six-way talks on North Korea’s nuclear program. But it has shown keen interest in the North Korea issue.

Is ROK ready to resume aid to DPRK?

[North Korea has been hit with another summer of poor weather for agriculture. First there was a drought which extended also to South Korea and areas of China. Then there came floods. Prospects for the harvest this year are extremely poor. Yet apart from China, the major donors of food aid to the DPRK (ROK, Japan, USA) continue to withhold aid, for various reasons that have been covered by CanKor previously. The following article (dated Paju, 24 August 2012) from the South Korean Yonhap news agency reports about a South Korean NGO effort to provide flood relief aid. The group was well received by the North, which agreed to receive the promised aid. The article also reports about indications that the ROK Government may be ready to continue aid to the North. --CanKor]

South’s aid group crosses border to discuss flood aid with North

A non-governmental South Korean aid group crossed the border early Friday to hold a discussion in North Korea over relief aid to the flood-stricken North.

ROK Unification Minister Yu Woo-ik (Photo by Yonhap)

Four officials of the Korea NGO Council for Cooperation with North Korea left the Doransan transit office in Paju, north of Seoul, around 10:00 a.m. to travel to Kaesong, a North Korean border city.

The council representing 51 South Korean private aid groups for the North said the officials will meet their counterparts from the National Reconciliation Council, North Korea’s organization for promoting friendship with the South, and discuss the South group’s plan to provide relief aid to North Koreans. The South Koreans will return home in the afternoon, according to the group.

Friday’s trip by the private aid group marks the first North Korean visit by a South Korean entity over the flood relief issue since the North was struck by devastating floods this summer.

The United Nations and other countries channeled funds and other relief goods to the North as part of their humanitarian assistance, but South Korea has remained mum so far due mainly to a chill in the South-North relations.

The latest trip helped fuel speculation over whether the Seoul government will decide to take action about the North’s flood damage despite the restrained inter-Korean relations.