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Category: Famine & Food Aid

February 13, 2007

Mysterious Pits in a North Korean Field, 39.944 N, 125.471 E : Image Analysts Wanted

[Update:    Coordinates corrected.]   [Update 2:Digg the story here.] Reader “kdehead” dropped a comment on another post below, with a link to a Google Earth image of a field near  of the “ghost cities” I’d described in this post.  Here is part of the image he links (click for full size): Here is his comment: ::Here is :  slightly OT”¦ but what is this? [link to image] are they trenches/pits with prisoners? note the bottom one – half full....
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Inside NK
February 4, 2007

Giving Up on the U.N.

Fred Fry has concluded that the U.N. will never do anything to save the North Korean people, and he  thinks it’s time for us to quit expecting otherwise.  He makes a compelling case, and  I’ve cited and quoted  plenty of the sources he quotes.  It’s not a case I can really refute. And still, I hold out hope.  First, some credit is due; the U.N. World Food Program probably did save many lives with its feeding operations between 1998 and...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
February 1, 2007

Remarkable Sky News Video of the Underground Railroad

Hundreds of refugees are risking their lives attempting to escape a brutal existence in North Korea. Sky News Asia correspondent Peter Sharp reports from China’s northern border where a savage winter is providing an impetus for an exodus of the weak and vulnerable: Hunger is stalking the bleak, windswept hills of North Korea. And for some of  the long-suffering residents of Kim Jong-il’s hermit kingdom it has  proved the final straw.  [read the rest] You can see the video here;...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Refugees
January 25, 2007

N. Korea Denies Misuse of UNDP Funds

Update 1/26:   The UNDP North Korea program has pretty much hit the wall.  The UN says  it will “adjust the North Korea program and delay its implementation” until “approved,” which most likely means until the audit is completed.   The U.S. annual allocation to the UNDP remains, but it has decided to withhold  all of those funds for the time being, and may propose an end to all UN programs in North Korea, except the humanitarian ones. Here’s the  one that really...
Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid
January 22, 2007

Ban Ki Moon Orders Review of U.N. Programs

Update 2:  Reuters reports that Ban is now backtracking and saying that the new audits will focus only on  programs where the financial practices are shady.  Monday’s U.N. statement said Ban would assign auditors only to U.N. funds and programs “in countries where issues of hard currency transactions, independence of staff hiring and access to reviewing local projects are pertinent.”  Audits would be “simultaneously carried out in select cases of countries” identified by the funds and programs, it said.  Funding...
Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid/Washington Views
January 21, 2007

Hundreds of North Koreans Freeze to Death

In addition to the reports of a pandemic that’s now  afflicted thousands in  Chongjin, North Korea’s fourth-largest city, there is now word via the London Daily Telegraph that cold weather has  stranded and killed hundreds in the northeastern mountains: The men who finally made it into the remote highland village of Koogang were greeted by an eerie silence and a gruesome sight. Lying among the simple wooden huts and burnt remnants of wooden furniture, they found the bodies of 46...
Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid
January 19, 2007

The UN’s Latest North Korea Scandal

I’ve often criticized the UN World Food Program (WFP)  for the inadequate monitoring  of its food aid program in North Korea, but as it turns out, there was something I didn’t know then:  compared to the UN Development Program’s (UNDP)  operations there, the  WFP’s  were a paragon of accountability.  Ever since the days when the disgraced team of Maurice Strong  and Tongsun Park began advising and representing Kofi Annan on North Korea, the UNDP has been funneling millions of dollars...
Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid
January 17, 2007

NGO: No New Year’s Rations in N. Korea This Year, Except in Pyongyang

More evidence that things are worse this year than they were last year.  North Korea has failed to deliver on its promise to distribute food rations across the communist country on the occasion of the New Year, a civic aid group said Wednesday. “Except for Pyongyang, no special New Year food rations were issued,” Good Friends, a Seoul-based civic relief organization, said in its latest monthly newsletter. The group said that North Korean authorities had planned to provide food rations...
Categories Deprogramming/Famine & Food Aid
January 16, 2007

Few Donors Contribute to N. Korean Army Mess Halls

A tally as of Sunday showed the relief agency received slightly more than US$16.25 million in assistance from donor nations, up from $12.7 million in November. But the total accounts for only 15.9 percent of the $102 million the WFP says it needs for its protracted relief and recovery operation (PRRO) in North Korea. [link] The missing context here is that the World Food Program had already dramatically scaled back its feeding operations from 6.5 million recipients, to just 1.9...
Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid
January 16, 2007

Pandemic Strikes Chongjin, North Korea’s Fourth-Largest City

Previous posts on the spreading pandemic here, beginning last October.  Yonhap, quoting unnamed sources and the NGO Good Friends, tells us that things have gotten worse, and that the largest city in North Korea’s northeast faces outbreaks of several deadly diseases: Four infectious diseases have stricken a North Korean city on the east coast, affecting up to 4,000 people, a source claimed Monday. “Chongjin is overrun by scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus and paratyphoid. About 3,000 to 4,000 are suffering from...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK
January 10, 2007

Two Questions for Lee Jae-Joung

1.  If poverty is  really the reason why North Korea builds nukes, then why is it that the people who actually built the thing  have so much higher a standard of living than  I do  (contrarily, I wonder how much Lee really knows about what poor North Koreans think about this)? 2.  If the key to denuclearization is ending poverty in North Korea, why has your government tolerated the North Korean regime’s theft of your government’s aid from the neediest...
Categories Appeasement/Famine & Food Aid/WMD
December 19, 2006

If I Were a Member of the North Korean Elite, I, Too Would Be Buying Up Gold and Chinese Real Estate

One of the least recognized moral responsibilities assumed by authoritarian states is the responsibility for misspent words and wealth they choose to get into the business of controlling.  For example, when the South Korean government  dabbles in the control of objectionable speech, whether for political or nationalistic reasons, it assumes responsibility for the decision to license, by omission,  (and sometimes,  even to subsidize) other objectionable or  controversial speech. To a much greater extent, North Korea, which aspires to a higher...
Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights
December 12, 2006

Bracing for Catastrophe

The Daily NK has more bleak reports from the North.  The first deals with how the regime’s block committees are feeling the strain of the people’s desperation to survive: More specifically, “Requests were made to be cautious of any act of anti-socialism such as secretly watching or spreading news of video tapes, anyone who uses a car to sell goods, any act of offering accommodation or receiving money for lease of accommodation and acts of brewing home-wine. In particular, in...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK
December 11, 2006

A Human Rights Lawyer Who Can’t Read a Two-Page U.N. Resolution?

President Roh Moo-hyun on Saturday told South Korean expatriates in New Zealand that preventing North Korea’s possible collapse is a “very important strategy” for our government because the North “will never wage war unless attacked or collapsing.” Seoul is therefore “concerned” about the suspension of humanitarian aid to the North under UN Security Council Resolution 1718, he added.  [link] Leave aside the sheer density of illogic in that brief statement, most of which speaks for itself.  Either Roh, a former...
Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/Famine & Food Aid/WMD
December 5, 2006

Kremlinology, Luxury Goods, and Stolen Rice

I don’t expect Resolution 1718’s luxury goods ban to have much of a  short-term impact on North Korea, beyond focusing attention  on all of the frivolous things Kim Jong Il would rather buy than rice.   For the longer term, however, Korea watcher Ken Gause, in what is probably the definitive work of North Korean Kremlinology (ht) did a pretty good job before-the-fact of explaining the gradual trends we seem to be hoping we can advance (Gause actually  spends almost none...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Kim Jong Il/Korean Politics/Kremlinology
December 2, 2006

N. Korea Has 1M Tonne Food Shortfall

The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that this year’s harvest in North Korea will be 1 million tonnes short of domestic needs. Despite an overall satisfactory food supply situation in the subregion, food shortages and emergencies persist, at national or subnational levels due to natural disasters and civil unrest. In DPR Korea, harvesting of the 2006 main season crops of rice, maize, and potatoes is underway. Lower output than last year is expected, as a result of severe floods...
Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid
November 27, 2006

CNN Reports from the Yalu River

The Daily NK provides this link to the video of the broadcast (which worked fine for me).  They show scenes from across the river and interview a refugee woman on the Chinese side. It’s nothing new, really, although it bears constant repetition that North Koreans aren’t brainwashed automatons.  Increasingly, they’re willing to say just what they think of the Dear Leader’s bounty … even to foreign journalists. On a related note, don’t miss the Daily NK’s follow-up to the protest...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/Refugees/Resistance