Secret famine stalks North Korea

ASK people to name the largest famine of this century, and most will probably say Ethiopia.

Ask them to identify the worst catastrophe of the present day and Zaire is likely to figure in most answers.

Wrong, on both counts. The two greatest famines of the century took place in Ukraine in the 1930s and in China in the 1960s. Unlike Ethiopia, neither was televised. And the worst tragedy currently unfolding is in North Korea, where the EU's humanitarian office (ECHO) estimates that 100,000 people have slowly starved to death in the past three years.

North Korea (or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) is the last Stalinist regime in the world and its system of collectivist agriculture is collapsing. As was the case in Ukraine and China, a brutal dictatorship refuses to acknowledge its mistakes and clings to power.

US Congressman Tony Hall is one of the few Westerners to have witnessed the devastation brought by three years of heavy flooding.

I saw entire paddies stunted by the floods, the seedheads empty of rice kernels. I saw cornfields stripped clean some two months before the ears would have ripened. And I saw almost no livestock, and just one factory of some two dozen we passed in operation."

That was last August. Now Congressman Hall has just returned from a second visit, where he witnessed the human price of another failed harvest in a country "rapidly descending into the hell of severe famine". Evidence of slow starvation was everywhere. Food rations have been limited for weeks to 100-150g a day, or half a bowl of rice. Meat has disappeared since the floods of last July, and heating is a thing of the past.

"In Anju city, I visited a private home unannounced. A young woman there said that her small family already had eaten the rice and corn gruel that would be their only meal that day. There was no food in the house, so Sunday's meal depended on finding food somehow. I stopped another girl who was busy foraging for grass, clover, any greens that were edible. Her family had not eaten since Friday.

"Most heart wrenching of all were the children I saw three year olds whose growth already was so stunted that they looked just half their age. Six month olds who were shockingly underweight. Orphans whose mothers had died in childbirth, or from hunger related diseases. I doubt one of them will live to see this year's harvest."

Help is beginning to arrive. The EU has pledged more than £20 million in food aid, and Trocaire has made a contribution to its sister agency in Hong Kong. But will the aid get to the people who need it? ~

Mr Hall describes North Korea's crisis as a "stealth famine". Emaciation is hidden behind layers of clothing to provide protection from the bitter winter, the old shield the young from the worst effects by sharing their rations, and the regime has enforced a media blackout. And these days, if a famine isn't on CNN, it doesn't rate.

North Korea also shows that Africa doesn't have a monopoly on hunger and crisis. Governments cause famine. War is the greatest source of suffering. Africa suffers more, largely because it has more war and more bad government than elsewhere. In eastern Zaire, for example, Hutu refugees are being starved to death in exactly the same way as in Korea.

For months now, somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 refugees have been pushed to and fro in the rainforests of eastern Zaire, desperately fleeing the fighting between Zairean troops and rebel forces. As in North Korea, the media have been denied access to the areas where they are believed to be hiding, for reasons which are now becoming clear.

According to reports coming from aid agencies to ECHO and UN officials, the rebels under Laurent Kabila - hitherto portrayed as "the good guy" in his conflict with the Mobutu regime - have been allowing the refugees to starve, or be attacked, or are killing them directly.

"There should be no shame in hunger, and its existence deserves to be treated as more than a sideshow to the geopolitical concerns that recently have dominated too many political leaders' attentions," says Congressman Hall.

But both North Korea and eastern Zaire show the need for a strong political strategy to accompany any humanitarian intervention. Otherwise, aid merely props up ailing dictators and preserves the status quo, however iniquitous. How else can we ensure that the corrupt Mobuta regime is not followed an even greater evil?