U.S. Congressman Urges Aid for North Korea : Asia: The nation might be ready to negotiate over its missile program if sanctions are lifted, an Ohio Democrat says.

North Korea is a medical disaster area where antibiotics and other basic medications are lacking and surgery is performed without anesthesia, said a visiting U.S. congressman who urged Monday that disputes over North Korea’s missile program not be allowed to obscure a continuing humanitarian disaster.

The nation’s orphanages have three or four times as many children as they did several years ago, the average birth weight of North Korean infants has plummeted to less than 5 pounds, tuberculosis and diarrhea are epidemic, and malnutrition is obvious even though famine is easing, said Rep. Tony P. Hall (D-Ohio).

Hall, speaking in Seoul after returning from his fifth visit in three years to the isolated North, said North Korean officials had indicated a new openness to negotiate over their ballistic missile program in exchange for the United States lifting the severe sanctions that have been imposed on the Stalinist state for nearly five decades.

Hall said North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan told him: “If the United States lifts sanctions, we will certainly respond with good faith. Sanctions drive [North Korea] into a corner. . . . We will not sit idle and starve.”

In what could be interpreted as a diplomatic overture in advance of a scheduled meeting between the United States and North Korea in Berlin on Sept. 7, Kim told Hall that North Korea had never said it would launch a missile and that reports to that effect were speculation.

The remark is notable since North Korea has been claiming for months that its right of self-defense as a sovereign nation includes developing, testing and producing missiles.

Hall quoted Kim as saying, “We know we are at an important and delicate moment,” and said the North Korean official, who is the lead negotiator with the U.S., had agreed that there was “a good chance that the problem could be resolved.”

“They want us to continue not only our food aid but also to lift sanctions,” Hall said. “I think if we do that, we will get a very favorable reaction. They said it just about that plainly.”

On Capitol Hill, and in the parliaments of Japan and South Korea, critics have been calling for a get-tough policy toward North Korea, arguing that it must agree to halt development, testing and sales of weapons of mass destruction and that its saber rattling must not be rewarded with more aid.

However, during a visit last week to Tokyo and in meetings in Seoul on Monday with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and others, Hall made the counterarguments that food should never be used as a political weapon, that unconditional humanitarian aid is desperately needed, and that U.S. aid has earned far more goodwill than is usually recognized.

“When I first went to North Korea and I’d go into villages, people would run. They were scared,” said Hall. “Now people want to talk to us, to be our friend. They thank us profusely.”

Hall insisted that the humanitarian aid has changed the perception of the United States in the “Hermit Kingdom.”

“Up until three years ago, they didn’t talk to anyone,” Hall said. “This is the last closed society on Earth, and they are starting to open up.

“We have a tremendous opportunity to help people who for 50 years have been convinced that we are the enemy, and we can do it for a tiny percentage of the cost of maintaining our military deterrent,” he said. “We have very little to lose in trying.”

South Korean and U.S. aid workers have expressed concern that the uptick in political tension since North Korea fired a missile over Japan in August 1998 has overshadowed North Korea’s continued misery.

North Korea’s civilian population should not be held hostage to the policies of its leadership, Randall Ireson of the American Friends Service Committee, which is providing agricultural aid to North Korean collective farms, said recently.

Hall reported that while children younger than 7--those targeted for most international food aid--appeared better nourished than on his previous trips, a group of 13-year-olds looked “very bad.”

“Their growth is stunted, their arms and legs are spindly,” he said. “They have very little life in them.”

Some babies Hall photographed had open sores on their heads, a classic sign of malnutrition. Aid workers reported that the average birth weight had plummeted from more than 7 pounds to about 4 3/4 pounds.

Hall visited two hospitals and said, “We saw surgery being performed without anesthesia on a heart patient and on a woman with breast cancer.”

Medical supplies are so short that outside the operating theater, cotton balls that had been used and then washed for reuse were drying on a window ledge, he said.

Recently, a United Nations car was broken into, but the thieves did not steal the radio or the spare tires.

“They stole the first-aid kit and the groceries and left everything else,” Hall told reporters.

He urged both Japan and South Korea, which have halted government aid to North Korea after recent diplomatic failures and military clashes, to open their pockets again.

The U.S. gives 83% of all food aid that North Korea receives. Japan, one of the world’s biggest aid donors, is spending an estimated $4 million a year to store millions of tons of surplus rice that is rotting in warehouses, Hall said.

He called on Japan to sell the rice to South Korea or the international community at “friendship prices” so that it can be donated to hungry North Koreans.

“They are going to remember who helped them when a great portion of their people died,” Hall said.

Japanese and South Korean officials have said their residents do not support resuming government food or fertilizer aid unless North Korea signals a softening of its hard-line military stance.