Politics or charity Korean dilemma

By CATHERINE FIELD Herald correspondent

PARIS - A United Nations appeal for cash to help North Korea to fight mass starvation has divided humanitarian agencies and highlighted the dilemma facing donor countries.

Those countries are asking if food handouts will give a lifeline to one of the world's vilest regimes, helping Kim Jong Il to feed the military and officials that keep him in power.

The UN World Food Programme, one of the few agencies operating in North Korea, asked for US$171 million to feed 6.5 million of the 22 million population this year.

The signs are not good. Last year, it sought US$204 million to buy 513,000 tonnes of cereals but received less than US$96 million, enabling it to meet less than 60 per cent of its goal.

A spokeswoman in Rome told the Herald the WFP acknowledged that misgivings over fair distribution could be discouraging pledges, but it remained determined to press ahead.

The causes of North Korea's food disaster are well known, and most are the fault of its secretive Stalinist regime. Help from traditional allies Russia and China fell away with the end of the Cold War, leaving the country dependent on its own harvests. Bad weather, amplified by environmental damage and economic mismanagement, led to tragedy.

North Korea first appealed for help in 1995 after some of the worst floods in more than a century destroyed rice crops. Two years later, it made another call for aid because of a crippling drought. The death toll from these two episodes, combined with floods in 1996, is estimated to be as high as a million.

In 2002, a survey by the WFP and the UN Children's Fund (Unicef) found that 42 per cent of North Korean youngsters suffered chronic malnutrition and 9 per cent acute malnutrition.

Addressing North Korea's needs is a task riddled with troubles. Aid agencies complain that the state's reluctance to ease its paranoid distrust of foreigners make it almost impossible to monitor distribution of any aid.

The WFP does not distribute the food it ships into North Korea - it is handed over to local officials - and has to give five days' notice if any of its inspectors wish to visit a food distribution centre.

This is a recipe for malpractice, say others.

"Assistance has been manipulated ... It has probably been used by the authorities who take some for themselves," claims Marie-Madeleine Le Plomb of the French agency Medecins sans Frontieres.

MSF's outrage is rooted in its own experience. It pulled out of North Korea in 1998 in protest at interference in its programme to supply medical assistance to 1400 health centres. It has now shifted its focus to helping North Korean refugees in China and South Korea.

"Our own aid was taken and given to other people, so we cancelled our activities. The refugees we speak to have never heard of the aid assistance and haven't see any of the food," Le Plomb told the Herald.

Outside help, of the kind administered by WFP, is the last pillar keeping Kim in power, say experts.

A report by a Washington think tank, the International Institute for Economics, estimates that Pyongyang receives around US$1 billion annually in foreign aid. Its author, Marcus Noland, believes that if an international embargo were imposed, the likelihood of "regime change" would be 40 per cent in the first year and a near-certainty within two years.