The Venerable Pomnyun, the New Famine, and the Regime’s Stability

Update: SAIS just cancelled Friday’s presentation. Sorry.

It is not the nature of famines to make heroes of men, but if a hero emerged from North Korea’s last Great Famine, it is the Buddhist monk the Venerable Pomnyun. I first heard of this man’s humanitarian work in Andrew Natsios’s “The Great North Korean Famine,” a book that, sadly, is must-reading once again.

The Ven. Pomnyun, who leads the charity Good Friends, was one of the few South Koreans to speak plainly about the last famine when the regime was denying it and other governments either didn’t acknowledge it or didn’t notice.

Sadly, history is repeating itself.  Despite ten years of Sunshine Policy and an illusory “breakthrough” on North Korea’s nukes, the Ven. Pomnyun states unequivocally that the Second March of Tribulation began last month. I heard him say this today at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies today, and you can hear him say it tomorrow and Friday, at 11 a.m., 1619 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C.  I strongly recommend that you go if you can; if you can’t, the Ven. Pomnyun gave me permission to post his slides. I will post them later, in an update.

There was a distinguished group in attendance today: Marcus Noland, Don Oberdorfer, David Hawk, Jae Ku, Suzanne Scholte, Chuck Downs, and a (the?) Counselor to the Korean Embassy, to name a few. The small audience — maybe 20 people at a conference table — did much to contribute to the quality of the discussion.  It was wonk heaven.

Here are the main points I took from Ven. Pomnyun’s presentation, the questions, and his answers:

* North Korea is now in a localized famine. Most of the large cities have been spared so far, but probably not for long. Kids have been especially hard hit. Parents are abandoning them, they become “kkotjaebi,” and the cops round them up and put them in “orphanages” where nobody bothers to feed them. So the kids die first. It pains you to know what is happening there, all over again. If there was a way to take a few of those kids into my home ….

* The famine will get much worse in the next two months. Ven. Pomnyun made the rather alarming prediction of 200,000 to 300,000 deaths, but I was not certain whether that was his prediction for the next two months or for a full year.

* Unlike the famine of the 1990’s, it’s the farmers who are getting the worst of this famine, not the city people. That is a direct function of North Korean government policies — crop seizures reminiscent of Ukraine in the 1930’s, anti-market crackdowns, the banning of farming on  private plots that even Stalin permitted in the bleak days of the 20’s, and of course, Kim Jong Il’s unconscionable eviction of the World Food Program,  and its refusal to ask South Korea or America for aid.

* Ven. Pomnyun sounded very desperate for some way to avert disaster, but he concedes that international organizations and national governments are neither prepared nor mobilized to respond. Even if they mobilized today, it would still be too late to avert a famine that’s much worse than it is now. Ven. Pomnyun held out the hope — misplaced, I believe — that if the United States delists North Korea as a state sponsor of terror, that all will be well, North Korea’s Pride will be soothed, the Americans will (again, ignoring the NKHRA; see Sec. 202) send in massive aid, no strings attached, and the South Koreans will feel free to follow suit.  The problem with that theory, as Marcus Noland pointed out, is that the South Koreans appear to be making their own decisions.

* A point made by Noland: Do not believe reports, such as this one in the Washington Post, that South Korea is refusing to give food aid unless the North Koreans agree to human rights improvements or denuclearization. The South Korean government has made it clear that humumanitarian assistance, as opposed to economic assistance, is based on humanitarian criteria and will be available if the North Koreans ask for it.  And for what it matters, I agree.  I see the misallocation of food as North Korea’s greatest human rights problem.  If we secure transparent food distribution, we’ll not only have accomplished our actual objective, we’ll have  done incalculable good for the human rights of North Koreans.

* But what of North Korea’s Pride, which prevents it from asking a “sycophantic traitor” for assistance? David Hawk prompted the obvious answer: let the North Koreans ask the World Food Program, whose monitoring is better than the South Koreans’, and which has given no offense to the regime.  According to Noland, the South Koreans would be willing to send their aid through the WFP.  Problem solved — that is, if you think the starvation of few hundred thousand expendables is really a problem.

* In response to a question I asked, Ven. Pomnyun stated that the North Korean authorities tend to mischaracterize starvation deaths as deaths due to disease, thus understating the death toll (Ven. Pomnyun’s death toll estimates, as I recall, are on the high side).  My question that led to that response was the one on which I think everything depends: to what degree is the elite sharing the pain?  Not much, he thinks.  There is still some bilateral aid coming through China, and it goes straight to Pyongyang. The haves think they have enough food stowed away to tide them over through the worst, and the fact that the elites  can still afford to  buy food in suburban markets and distribute low quality rice from military stocks suggests as much.  And clearly, there’s now a bidding war underway for what food North Korea has, and the elites are winning the race to be the last to die.  Ven. Pomnyun doesn’t think the famine is going to destabilize the regime’s hold on power, though that’s somewhat at odds with the invitation I received for this event: “The Venerable Pomnyun will speak about the consequences of the severe food shortages and the high potential for unrest in North Korea.”  Or not.

I agree that localized dissent in such far-flung places at Chongjin is not likely to be a serious threat to the regime. If the elite don’t feel the pain, the system will probably hold. Which is why I think that cutting off the regime’s cash flow has humanitarian benefits as well as diplomatic ones. They won’t share unless they have to.