U.S. Officials Report Horror of N. Korea Famine

A year after reports of mass starvation in North Korea stunned the world, the situation there remains dire, with as many as 800,000 people dying of malnutrition each year, say U.S. officials who just returned from a weeklong research trip to the Communist nation.

It was the first time that U.S. government observers have publicly confirmed the grim toll taken by North Korea’s famine since word of the country’s suffering trickled out three years ago. Speaking here in the Chinese capital Wednesday, the bipartisan U.S. delegation of congressional aides told wrenching stories and showed graphic videotaped footage of teenagers far shorter than normal height, adults emaciated from hunger and infants too listless to respond and too weak to sit up unassisted.

Main streets in North Korea appeared deserted, even in Pyongyang, the capital. Conditions are especially desperate in the countryside, where floods have ruined crops and lives, the delegation reported.

“If I were to use one word to describe our visit to rural areas, it would be ‘miserable.’ People lack basic resources,” said Maria Pica, an aide to Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) and one of the four congressional staff members who participated in the Aug. 11-18 visit to North Korea.

The team members said they were granted “unprecedented access” to sites across the country, including remote areas not previously visited by U.S. observers.

The situation apparently is almost as grave as last year, when reports of extensive starvation--even unsubstantiated rumors of cannibalism--in one of the world’s most isolated, secretive dictatorships sparked widespread concern.

Since the famine hit in 1995, between 300,000 and 800,000 North Koreans have died each year from malnutrition and related diseases, the delegation members said, citing relief agencies and interviews with refugees. The North Korean government denies that many have died.

The visiting team credited international relief agencies with staving off more deaths, particularly among their target population of children under 7 years old. To ease the crisis, the United States has pledged 220,000 tons of food through the United Nations World Food Program, with China offering 110,000 tons and the European Union an additional 95,000 tons.

Proposals to increase the amount of U.S. aid, however, have met with opposition from high-ranking Republicans who fear that the food is being diverted from civilians to feed the North Korean military.

Efforts to monitor who actually receives the food are thwarted because the North Korean government bars relief workers from making unscheduled on-site inspections, said delegate Mark Kirk, who serves as counsel to the House International Relations Committee. While the delegation witnessed no diversions of U.S.-provided aid, “that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” one team member said.

Moreover, North Korea continues to export $500 million worth of missiles a year, said Peter Brookes, a Republican aide with the House International Relations Committee and a member of the delegation. Iran and Pakistan are believed to be among its customers. Pyongyang says it will stop such trade only if the United States will compensate it for the lost revenue, Brookes said, possibly equivalent to as much as one-third of all North Korean exports.

“Doubling aid to North Korea will only encourage more irresponsible actions,” a powerful coalition of GOP congressmen wrote in an Aug. 6 letter to President Clinton. “We will oppose any planned increase in food assistance to North Korea so long as these problems remain,” added the letter, whose signatories included Reps. Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), chairman of the International Relations Committee; Bob Livingston (R-La.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee; and Jay C. Kim (R-Diamond Bar), Congress’ only Korean American member.

Allegations this week that the Pyongyang regime is secretly trying to build a nuclear reactor or reprocessing plant will probably complicate matters.

The congressional staff members who spoke in Beijing on Wednesday made clear that the magnitude of the suffering in North Korea is huge.

Many children live in orphanages, their parents killed in the devastating floods that swamped the country in 1995 and 1996 and precipitated the famine. Hospitals are so ill-equipped that even clean water to wash linens is in short supply. Videotaped visits to schools showed teenagers so stunted in growth from lack of food that one 16-year-old boy stood less than 4 feet tall.

Like the other adolescents in his classroom, the youngster was barefoot and appeared poverty-stricken--in a northern town barely a mile away from the relative abundance in nearby China.

Millions of North Koreans rely on alternative food sources such as ground-up weeds or cornstalks mixed with flour--a scarce commodity--and turned into strips of black, hard “bread.” Yet even this food source can pose a threat to the hungry, who often come down with diarrhea, which further weakens them.

To increase food production in the heavily collectivized Marxist country, Western experts have encouraged the North Korean government to allow more private cultivation of land. But “there is absolutely no economic reform going on in [North] Korea today,” Kirk said.

Instead, while its people lack basic necessities, the government is gearing up for a lavish celebration Sept. 9 of the nation’s 50th anniversary and leader Kim Jong Il’s assumption of the presidency. The U.S. delegation saw workers scurrying to erect flagpoles and portraits of Kim.

Some analysts have warned that Kim’s hold on power is tenuous, with the regime in danger of being toppled. But the U.S. officials said they saw no indications of imminent collapse.