Now we know why Kim Jong-un has lost weight!
Food Aid to North Korea Leads to Starvation | Opinion
Gordon G. Chang | Monday, November 29, 2021
A North Korean court on November 10 sentenced two cadres to life imprisonment for “anti-socialist and non-socialist acts”—in this case, “violating the closed border.” The officials, trying to alleviate a severe food shortage in North Hamgyong province, were buying rice from China.
The convictions come as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea heads into another famine, perhaps even worse than the four-year “Arduous March” of the mid-1990s. Then, perhaps as many as 3.5 million people died, representing more than 10 percent of the population.
North Korea’s people have just been told to not expect relief until 2025. “Some of the residents are saying that the situation right now is so serious that they don’t know if they can even survive the coming winter,” said a “source,” a resident in the border town of Sinuiju, to Radio Free Asia Korean Service on October 21. “They say that telling us to endure hardship until 2025 is the same as telling us to starve to death.”
Several paragraphs follow, telling readers about the policies which have led to serious food shortages, not the least of which was the Kim Jong-un regime’s decision in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; as the Hermit Kingdom closed down its borders and restricted trade, the things needed to increase food production went unsupplied.
Then we get to the money quotes:
Why not send in trucks with assistance? The essential problem is the diversion of food aid from intended recipients. “The Kim regime controls the distribution system and prioritizes a certain class of people—the elites who help run the system,” Tara O of the East Asia Research Center and the Hudson Institute tells Newsweek. “In the past, North Korea even exported food aid in the midst of famine, and it’s likely it used the foreign currency derived from the sales for other purposes, such as nuclear weapons development.”
As O, a former U.S. Air Force officer, says, “North Korea has faced chronic food shortages for decades, and it never addressed the root causes, which is its control system of central planning, skewed prioritization and isolation.” Food aid, she points out, “would be used to perpetuate the very system that brings about hunger.”
O is right. Donors unfortunately allow the regime to distribute their food, which leads to a multitude of ills, including the regime bragging that other nations are sending tribute to the Kim family. That’s why the regime continues to practice “mendicant diplomacy.”
Simply put, Gordon G. Chang, the author of The Coming Collapse of China and Losing South Korea, is telling anyone who will listen that it’s wiser, in the long run, not to send food to the starving people of the DPRK, to destroy the Kim dynasty, or at least radically change the system. The food will be provided mainly to Kim dynasty allies, and the common people won’t see much of it, so it’s wiser just to let them starve, to weaken the regime.
But, let’s be honest here: in World War II we were perfectly willing to kill civilians, through bullets and bombs, through firestorm attacks and, in the end, two atomic bombs. Starvation is slower, but again, honesty demands that we acknowledge that the destruction of Germany and Japan’s infrastructure and delivery systems did lead to some dying of hunger.
The Third Reich’s siege of Leningrad led to 1.1 million deaths, mostly of starvation, and if that was ‘just’ last century, much of Europe saw such tactics in medieval siege warfare. The starvation of the common people to force a military decision is not a new tactic.
But, are we really willing to do that to force regime change in North Korea? And if we were, how long would that take?