The Beginning of the End: Food Shortages Reach Pyongyang (Updated)
[Update: Welcome to all of you who are coming in from Gateway Pundit and Best of the Web, and many thanks to James Hoft and James Taranto for linking.]
Now that I’ve just spent five days writing this dissertation on North Korea’s worsening food situation, there’s dramatic new information that alters the entire analysis. This may be the single most significant event in North Korean history since the invention of blogs, because if it’s true, the regime is finished.
North Korea’s chronic food shortage has worsened to affect even some of the country’s elite citizens in Pyongyang, a South Korean aid group said Thursday.
The communist nation has not given rice rations to medium- and lower-level officials living in Pyongyang, the capital city, this month after cutting the rations by 60 percent in February, the Good Friends aid agency said in its regular newsletter.
Pyongyang citizens are considered the most well-off in the isolated, impoverished country, where the government controls most means of production and operates a centralized ration system. Only those deemed most loyal to Kim Jong Il’s regime are allowed to live in the capital. [AP]
More at Sky News. The report notes that in the countryside, workers are receiving no food at all and aren’t showing up for work because they’re too weak to plant crops.
The regime has contained and survived mass-casualty famine and dissent in the countryside before. A severe downturn in Pyongyang, however, is a game-changer. If the regime can’t even feed its elite, it’s going to have to take some chairs away from the banquet table. That means commissars and apparatchiks will shiv each other for the remaining chairs as though their lives depend on it. A rumored phase-out of the “military first” policy introduces a whole new pool of potential coup plotters. This could be the beginning of the end. If the report is true — and if China doesn’t execute an Olympic-sized airlift to reverse those conditions fast — there’s a 70% chance of regime collapse within the next year.
So if North Korea asks us for food aid, what should we say? We should agree, as long as the World Food Program can distribute the food through its own distribution system to every single county, village, Army barracks, and concentration camp. No exceptions. Wouldn’t that be saving a repellent regime? No, that would be a humane way of destroying a repellent regime that was built on isolation and xenophobic mythology.
Updates: The BBC adds that rations have stopped even in South Hwanghae, North Korea’s traditional rice bowl. And if more evidence were needed of why any international food aid must be monitored carefully, the Chosun Ilbo publishes photographs of North Korean army trucks delivering sacks of humanitarian aid — complete with red cross emblem — to army posts along the DMZ.
An equally significant development is the continuing decline of the regime’s control of its border with China. Last September, I told you of the accelerating trends in this direction, and how corruption and low morale were turning the North Korean border guards into toll-takers, drug mules, and deserters. In January, I surveyed the signs that the regime was weakening, but concluded that collapse did not yet appear to be imminent.
It looks imminent now.
The North Korean regime has always depended on isolation to control the thoughts, movements, and resources of the people. Without that isolation, Kim Jong Il’s personality cult dies like a vampire in the daylight.
Now, for a fee, any South Korean journalist can hire a Chinese boatman to float up to North Korea and toss bags of sausages to starving people who pretend — briefly — not to want them. At these “human safaris” along the Yalu River, even ruling party officials are reduced to begging tourists for trinkets. The imperative tone of voice is a hard habit to break:
A moment later, another man appeared on the shore. The guide hinted that he was a “senior member of the North Korean Workers’ Party.” He warned us not to speak Korean. “Give me money,” the man said. We gave him 100 yuan. He demanded more, saying, “Give me ball-point pens and cigarettes.”
The boatman got angry. “You guys are always asking for anything and everything, aren’t you?” We moved another 400 m ahead, when three children waved to us, gesturing as if they were counting money. “Go away,” the guide yelled at them. We met about 10 more North Koreans. They too came quietly near us and took the food we had brought with us. All the North Koreans who got angry at us also ended up taking the food.
The North Korean-Chinese border was literally falling down. Across it, one group of North Korean refugees follows another every day. Those who don’t are treated like animals at home. [Chosun Ilbo]
Some of us grumble about Beijing’s selection as the host of the 2008 Olympics, but if the IOC had picked Toronto, the Chinese Army would probably be massing in Dandong instead of Lhasa right now.
Update 22 Mar 08:
It’s interesting to go back to the immediate aftermath of the floods and read my own analysis of their likely impact. One unsurprising but ironic facet of Roh Moo-Hyun’s lame-duck summit in Pyongyang, which the floods postponed, is the role it apparently played in making the food situation worse:
“The Leaders of Revolution (referring to the nation’s top authorities) suddenly began to suppress market activities around October 2007 when the inter-Korean Summit was just about to take place. The authorities wanted to stop the spread of the ever growing positive attitudes towards South Korea among the public,” reports the magazine.
The magazine also reports about an order issued by the Central Committee of the Workers’ party in October 2007, saying, “The order describes jangmadang as a breeding place of anti-socialist activities which must be cracked down. The order points out that merchants are now spreading a rosy fantasy of the enemy [referring to S. Korea] by trading South Korean goods in the jangmandang, and calls for actions to root out anti-socialist activities.
“The conservatives and privileged groups of North Korea have been exploiting the people by controlling market activities. Gradually, their control has been weakened as the market expanded and those merchants with capital began to trade goods from South Korea and China and made good fortune,” reports the magazine.
“However, the Inter-Korean Summit, held in Pyongyang last October, changed the course of jangamadang (market) development,” says the magazine. The North Korean authorities began strictly regulating the markets for the reason that the South Korean media have begun reporting on the jangmadangs, and moreover that the President of South Korea was visiting North Korea, says the magazine. [Daily NK]
So much for Sunshine opening up North Korea to reform.
Today, nations, including ours, are starting to come to grips with the possibility of a humanitarian disaster:
A U.S. State Department official visited South Korea to assess North Korea’s food situation amid reports of a worsening food shortage in the communist state, a government source here said Thursday. Mark Phelan, an analyst in food security at the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, spent two days in Seoul from Monday for talks with related Unification Ministry officials and aid activists, the source said. [Yonhap]
Phelan and his South Korean hosts are said to have agreed that the food situation in the North will worsen:
Washington reportedly intends to send 500,000 tons of food aid to the impoverished North in line with a six-party agreement on denuclearizing the communist state signed in February last year. However, Pyongyang’s refusal to accept monitoring by U.S. officials of food distribution has been hampering any implementation of the plan, according to reports.
In Washington, State Department Spokesman Tom Casey restates the principles that will govern U.S. humanitarian aid to the North:
Casey summed up the criteria as: first, what is the existing need; second, how does that need balance out against competing needs elsewhere in the world; and third, the ability to ensure that the food provided actually reaches the people in need.
Casey emphasized the weight of transparency in the distribution system, citing that the World Food Program had ceased operations for a time “because they felt that they could not adequately monitor and ensure that foods were reaching the folks there,” and that “it’s important to continue discussions on this issue and if possible, be in a position to be able to provide that kind of support to the people in need in North Korea. [Daily NK]
While I’m glad to see us sticking to our conditions on monitoring — for now — I’m not sure our government grasps the full potential for social chaos and humanitarian disaster if North Korea has now begun its final dissolution into anarchy in earnest. Unfortunately, few Americans grasp how profoundly broken, denuded, and dysfunctional North Korea has become during Kim Jong Il’s reign. (That being said, on balance, the collapse of this unspeakably barbaric regime may well save more lives that it would cost … if other nations’ response is coordinated and efficient.)
How can food be distributed to the blighted interior of a nation whose infrastructure is broken — its railways sagged and buckled, its ports and electrical grid dilapidated?
Are conditions in North Korea so disastrous that not even South Korean companies would invest in what’s left of it?
Has South Korea made plans to breach the DMZ to establish feeding centers and refugee camps?
Who will send task forces in to the concentration camps to feed and care for the tortured souls there? Do we have plans to document and prosecute Kim Jong Il’s crimes against humanity? Would we consider accepting the grave injustice of letting Kim Jong Il and his henchmen escape the gallows if by doing so, we could save lives?
If the security forces shatter into fratricidal factions, how will America, South Korea, and China react? If China moves in, how forcefully would South Korea oppose it? In light of the Roh Administration’s uncooperative approach to updating OPLAN 5029, how quickly can those old differences now be resolved. If the Pentagon is forced to implement OPLAN 5027 instead, has it considered the effect of generations of anti-American indoctrination on ordinary North Koreans?
Would a Chinese intervention effectively re-draw the DMZ, or even perpetuate it in place, thus robbing Koreans of their dream of reunification? Since no one wants war with China, have American or South Korean diplomats started talking to the Chinese about these contingencies?