Aid to North Korea

All aid agencies have to face this dilemma: how to square their commitment to meet the immediate humanitarian needs of the people they're trying to help with the inescapable truth that they may thereby be serving to prop up a brutal regime. In the case of North Korea the dilemma must be particularly acute. The regime there controls which people the agencies can see, and how the aid is allocated. It's immediately apparent that the policies of the regime, quite apart from the question of its extreme human rights abuses, contribute fundamentally to the desperate situation in which the North Korean people find themselves. And since the acceptance of aid runs directly counter to the juche ideology of socialist self-reliance, the whole business is entirely hypocritical: the agencies, while supplying aid, are at the same time reviled by the North Korean government as part of an imperialist plot to undermine the regime.

This paper (via NKZone) provides an intelligent discussion of the problems faced by NGOs operating in North Korea:

One of the most unsettling aspects of humanitarian work in North Korea is the disconnect between the country’s proud official face and its desperate reality. For me, a scene I witnessed along a dusty road in North Hwanghae Province in 1997, when I directed an NGO aid program, was emblematic of this apparent state of denial. Our team was returning to Pyongyang after visiting a hospital where severely malnourished children were being rehydrated with drip fed from discarded beer bottles. An elderly woman was collapsed at the roadside under a large brown bundle, clearly exhausted. Above her one of the ubiquitous arches across the road proclaimed in large letters: “The Victory of Socialism is in sight!” [...]

The most fundamental question for aid agencies considering helping the people in North Korea is
whether or not aid actually prolongs their suffering by prolonging the life of a repressive and ineffective regime. As I worked in North Korea I framed the question this way: “When the day comes when they can speak freely, will the farmers, workers and prisoners of North Korea thank me or condemn me for having collaborated with the state to deliver aid?” Until that day we must make our decision by balancing the multiple positive impacts of aid on individuals as well as on the North Korean system against any negative impacts aid might have.

There can be little doubt that the policies of the North Korean regime have contributed directly and indirectly to the humanitarian crisis in the country. The absolute control over citizens' lives, the distribution of benefits according to political loyalty, the ultimate threat of banishment of whole families to prison camps for political offenses all point to human rights abuses of the most egregious nature. Many of those who have successfully fled the regime, including former Workers Party SecretaryHwang Jang Hyop, refer to the North as one large prison camp and suggest that the sooner the regime falls, the sooner relief will come to the people. Others point to the massive misallocation of resources by the regime. Scarce funds and resources are poured into military programs and Kim cult monuments while hospitals lack heat, basic medicines and equipment. Another argument is that only fundamental changes in economic structure and policies will bring an end to the crisis, and find little evidence that the Kim Il Jong is willing or able to implement such reforms. So, should aid agencies simply hold back and "let nature take its course"?

One impact that is profound in its implications is that North Korea, for all its trumpeting on self-reliance, has become fundamentally dependent on the charity of the international community for the survival of a large portion of its population.

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[Mark]

The fact that marxism is still uncritically used in every Western university as an explanatory theory in view of the increasingly depraved instantiations of it is one of the great intellectual mysteries of our time.