Poverty in the Developing World - North Korea
The peninsula on which both North and South
Korea are located was under Japanese rule until the end of World War II in
1945. At that point the United States began occupying the southern half and the
Soviet Union took over the northern half. The two countries' inability to agree
on unification led to the formation of two separate governments in the north
and south. War broke out between them in 1950 and ended in 1953, with a
permanent demilitarized zone separating the two countries; this area has been
called the most dangerous place on earth. From the end of the war until his
death in 1994, Kim Il-Sung, who called himself (and demanded that all North
Koreans call him) "Great Leader," ruled North Korea. Following his
death, leadership went to his son Kim Jong-Il, who is known as "Dear
Leader." Between their two periods of leadership, the father and son
created a cult of personality and amassed military strength that enriched them
and the country's upper class and left North Korea's ordinary citizens in such
severe poverty that in the late 1990s as many as three million died of
starvation (estimates vary; the North Korean government claims 600,000 died,
while some nongovernmental organizations and human rights watchdog groups say
one million). Human rights abuses abound in the country as well. In fact, North
Korea is known for having one of the worst records in the world for the
treatment of its own citizens.
It is also one of the most secretive
societies in the world. Even photographs from inside the country are rare.
Because everything is so tightly controlled by the authorities, valid
statistics are generally nonexistent, although some nongovernmental
organizations do manage to obtain data, and the government of South Korea keeps
statistics as well. According to the South Korean Ministry of Unification
(2006, http://www.unikorea.go.kr/en/index.jsp), the average annual income in
North Korea was $818 in 2003. Because poverty numbers and other human
development information provided by the government of North Korea are known to
be inaccurate, the country is not ranked by the UNDP Human Development Index.
In the early 1990s authorities were believed to be inflating the numbers to
receive more foreign aid. By the late 1990s they were downplaying the severity
of the problem. As of December 2005 the government was denying the presence of
starvation in the country and planning to expel all nongovernmental aid
organizations (Jehangir Pocha,
"Cult of Ideology: North Korea Struggles to Save Face by Resisting Crucial
Foreign Aid," December 5, 2005,
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2420/).
Death Camps, Famine, and the Pursuit of
Nuclear Weapons
For his article "A Gulag with Nukes:
Inside North Korea" (July 17, 2005,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/north_korea_2686.jsp),
Jasper Becker interviewed refugees from North Korea who had firsthand knowledge
of the inner workings of the country, from slave labor camps to the palaces of
Kim Jong-Il. Becker refers to these refugees as "escapees from the last
slave society left in the world." David Hawk of the U.S. Committee for
Human Rights in North Korea concurs. In The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North
Korea's Prison Camps—Prisoners' Testimonies and Satellite Photographs
(2003, http://hrnk.org/HiddenGulag.pdf), Hawk estimates that 150,000 to 200,000
North Koreans are held in penal colonies throughout the country. The prisoners
are people who may or may not have committed crimes but are perceived as
criminals by authorities. Relatives of the prisoners are abducted and
imprisoned as well. Detainment for alleged criminals is frequently lifelong, and there is no legal recourse. In fact, the
accused are never actually arrested or charged with anything. They are simply
snatched off the street and taken to interrogation facilities, where they may
be tortured into confessing. Family mem-bers—usually
parents, children, and grandparents—are kept in separate camps for
"reeducation"; eventually, they may be released. This notion of
"guilt by association" dates back to 1972, when Kim Il-Sung
proclaimed that the blood lines of prisoners should be wiped out for three
generations.
Prisoners detained in the camps are fed a
starvation diet, meaning they are given the least possible amount of food to
keep them alive and allow them to perform brutally difficult labor at least
twelve hours a day, seven days a week. According to Sung Hun Han's article "Poverty
Line in North Korea" (2005, http://www.bepress.com/peps/vol11/iss1/3/),
adult prisoners are given the same amount of food that is allotted in the
government's grain rationing program to two- to four-year-old children. The
below-subsistence diet causes long-term physical deformities, and the dangerous
working environment results in high numbers of amputations and disabilities.
Additionally, feeding prisoners the absolute bare minimum creates an atmosphere
of distrust and suspicion among them, making them fight each other for extra
scraps of food and the clothing of those who have died. They are also known to
turn each other in to the guards for indiscretions. Punishment is either
confinement in a boxlike structure whose size makes both standing and lying
down impossible, causing circulation to be cut off and slow death, or prisoners
are killed by hanging or by a firing squad in front of other prisoners.
According to the Korea Institute for National
Unification's annual White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2004,
North Korea operates a rations system, under which all citizens receive food,
clothing, medical care, housing, education, and pensions directly from the
government. The thinking behind the system is that it will instill gratitude in
the people, yet, because of the small amount of goods they receive, they are
being kept from becoming lazy and frivolous. The grain distribution system had
collapsed by the 1990s, with citizens receiving less than one-third the amount
they needed to survive. In late 1996 grain rations were stopped altogether,
leaving people to acquire their own food, mostly from the black market. Those
who lacked the resources to buy food off the black market faced starvation. In
fact, from 1996 to 1999 millions did starve to death
in one of the largest famines in modern history. Exact figures are unknown
because of the North Korean government's strict control of all information
entering and leaving the country, but as many as three million people are
believed to have starved to death, mostly children.
In 2004 the government loosened its control
of food supplies slightly by allowing some markets to operate privately and
expand their selection of goods. Some farms were also privatized. However, in
October 2005 authorities reversed these policies and again prevented the sale
of grain in markets. The decision to expel all aid organizations from the
country by the end of 2005 because they were creating an atmosphere of
"dependency" and because the harvest was allegedly expected to
improve alarmed international agencies, who warned that another famine could be
imminent without emergency food aid. With tensions escalating over North
Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons, the United States announced in May 2005
that it would suspend all food aid to the country, although U.S. officials
denied they were using food as a political tool. At issue for the United States
and other countries, as well as for aid organizations such as the United
Nations World Food Program, is the limited amount of monitoring allowed by
North Korea. Questions of whether
aid actually reaches the country's neediest people or is intercepted and
distributed to military officers has long been a point of contention for those
who provide relief. Regardless, the North Korean government will not
allow agencies to monitor or report on the progress of their programs within
the country.
In Hunger and Human Rights: The Politics of Famine in North Korea (2005), Stephan
Haggard and Marcus Noland of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea
contend that the famine of the mid- to late-1990s was not simply a matter of
bad weather patterns devastating crops, as the North Korean government has
insisted. Instead, Haggard and Noland believe—along with many other
researchers—that the famine was a preventable tragedy that was caused by the
failed agricultural and social services system. In essence, the disaster is
widely considered to have been a man-made famine. Certainly, North Korea has
experienced extreme weather for more than ten years. Aidan Foster-Carter
reports in "North Korea's Kim-Made Famine" (May 23, 2001,
http://www.atimes.com/koreas/CE23Dg02.html) that the country has been in a
cycle of drought and flood since 1994. However, Foster-Carter explains that a
program of ill-advised agricultural techniques, combined with the system of
collective farming, have proven disastrous to the country.
North Korea is 80% mountainous. To advance it
ideology of complete independence, leaders cut the country off from trade and
instead cleared land for farming higher and higher into the mountains. This
"terracing" had two consequences: severe deforestation left the
valleys vulnerable to landslides, and tenuously arable land was made even less
fertile with the overuse of harsh chemical fertilizers. Furthermore, a
government-imposed commitment to raise corn and rice, to the exclusion of most
other crops, had left much of the population malnourished long before the
events of the 1990s brought the situation to its crisis. So when the unusually
heavy rains began in 1995, the terraced farms were washed away down the
mountains, onto the fields in the valleys, destroying all the crops. This
pattern is ongoing.
Haggard and Noland report that during and
since the famine the North Korean government has blocked humanitarian relief
efforts. When it has allowed aid to filter in, it has diverted its own funding
away from feeding its people and instead focused on increasing its
militarization program. The roots of the food crisis are, however, in the
division of Korea into north and south. Historically, the northern region was
devoted to industry and the southern to agriculture. When the peninsula was
officially broken up into the two countries after the Korean War, the North
developed policies devoted to strict self-reliance, which isolated it from its
main source of food in South Korea. The Soviet Union and China stepped in as
trading partners to some degree, but the collapse of the former and the
economic transformation of the latter further alienated North Korea and left it
with even less foreign economic support.
Many observers believe that behind the
decade-long food crisis and the general state of poverty in North Korea is the
country's pursuit of a nuclear program and the overall attention to increasing
military might at all costs. North Korea has sought a nuclear program since the
Korean War, when the United States threatened to use nuclear weapons against
the North as part of its support of the South (Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, "North Korea's Nuclear Program,
2005," May-June 2005, http://www.thebulletin.org/article_nn.php?art_ofnmj05
norris). The continued U.S. military presence in
South Korea, as well as North Korea's allegiance to the Soviet Union throughout
the cold war, further spurred the North's nuclear ambitions. It is not known
for certain whether or not North Korea has nuclear weapons or enriched uranium,
as both North Korean and U.S. leaders claim. However,
according to Norris and Kristensen, North Korean
leaders may see the sale of weapons and/ or components to rogue governments as
one way to deal with its people's ongoing impoverishment.
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